Some readers may have seen Der Spiegel's coverage of the Bengtsson affair a couple of days back. I didn't cover it, as I recall because it didn't seem to add much we didn't know already. However, one interesting wrinkle has emerged today. This revolves around a quote from Myles Allen about the Lewis/Crok report:
Professor Myles Allen, a climate researcher at Oxford, says, "The problem is [GWPF's] anti-science agenda, clearly illustrated by the fact that they refused point blank to submit their recent report criticizing the IPCC 5th Assessment Report to the same kind of open peer review that the IPCC report was itself subjected to."
This has prompted a response from Lewis and Crok who describe this alleged 'point-blank' refusal. Crok writes:
I met Myles Allen when he was in The Netherlands for an IPCC meeting in January. I told him about our report and he was quite upset that we hadn’t asked him to review it. Shortly after that meeting, Allen separately emailed both Lewis and myself asking if he could see a copy of our report. Lewis and I conferred and then responded to Allen indicating no objections to sending him the report on the basis that he would review it and comment on anything he disagreed with...
Unfortunately, Allen would not accept the confidentiality condition. Instead he suggested that Lewis and Crok send their draft to all the IPCC authors mentioned in the report and there seems to have been a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing, before the report was ultimately reviewed by climatologists who were not involved in the IPCC process. As Crok concludes:
So, yes, Allen is right when he says in Der Spiegel that the GWPF refused to submit our report “to the same kind of open peer review that the IPCC report was itself subjected to”. We disagree about his qualification “point blank”. Allen, having asked for a copy of the report, then refused to review it under what we regard as normal confidentiality conditions. Three other AR5 lead authors were also offered the opportunity to review it. We leave it up to readers to decide if we and the GWPF acted reasonably, and whether this episode provides any evidence that the GWPF has an anti-science agenda.
Indeed. Prof Allen needs to tread carefully I would say, lest people think his tales need to be checked as much as, say, Bob Ward's do.