More peer review gatekeeping

Icecap has an interesting new article by three sceptic scientists - John McLean, Chris de Freitas and Bob Carter - describing the successful attempts to deny them a right of reply in the peer-reviewed literature.

The practice of editorial rejection of the authors’ response to criticism is unprecedented in our experience. It is surprising because it amounts to the editorial usurping of the right of authors to defend their paper and deprives readers from hearing all sides of a scientific discussion before they make up their own minds on an issue. It is declaring that the journal editor - or the reviewers to whom he defers - will decide if authors can defend papers that have already been positively reviewed and been published by that same journal. Such an attitude is the antithesis of productive scientific discussion.

Read the whole thing (PDF).

More silliness

Daniel Cressey at Nature's Great Beyond blog seems to be adding his voice to those who support the idea of Lord Oxburgh being a suitable chairman for the Royal Society panel despite the noble lord's conflict of interest.

Daniel's case for the defence is almost as obscure as Fiona Harvey's but seems to consist of a belief that since Bob Ward, the public relations officer at the Grantham Institute, predicted that the appointment would be criticised, we should shrug our shoulders and move on. I hope I'm not misjudging Daniel's position here, because he doesn't make his position very clear. I do sense, however, that his article carries an air of criticism of those who are pointing out the conflict of interest rather than those who are behind it.

You have to laugh, don't you?

Keenan responds to Jones

Doug Keenan has taken issue with the way Nature has described his complaint against Phil Jones co-author Wei-Chyung Wang. In particular they seem to have missed the point that the evidence Wang cited didn't actually exist.

His comments are here.

Fred Pearce on peer review

Fred Pearce again, this time looking at Hockey Team efforts to undermine peer review, and making a much better fist of it than he did of the Hockey Stick.

I found it interesting that he'd managed to speak to James Saiers, the editor of McIntyre and McKitrick's submission to GRL and who was the subject of a Hockey Team plot to oust him. I had tried to make contact with Saiers myself, soon after Climategate broke, but unfortunately got no response. Pearce has him repeating his earlier assertions that his departure from GRL was unconnected with any pressure from outside agencies, and was simply due to his term of office as editor coming to an end. This much is known already. The more interesting question, and the one I had wanted Saiers to respond to is how he had come to be replaced as editor by the much more hostile Jay Famiglietti, an event shrouded in secrecy since Famiglietti only agreed to explain it to McIntyre and McKitrick off the record.

Still, Pearce is new to questioning climate science, and he hasn't made a bad fist of this story.

Hans von Storch says Nature invented quotes

Everybody's favourite environmental journal, Nature, seems to have got itself into hot water. Hans von Storch reports on his Die Klimazwiebel blog that the quotes attributed to him in Quirin Schiermeier's article (see previous posting) did not form part of the interview between the two men.

Quirin Schiermeier quotes me with "You need to be very circumspect about the added value of downscaling to regional impacts," agrees Hans von Storch in this week's issue of nature. And: he cautions, "planners should handle them with kid gloves. Whenever possible, they'd rather wait with spending big money on adaptation projects until there is more certainty about the things to come." I have not spoken with Mr Schiermeier about regional modelling, at least not recently; the term "kid gloves" is unknown to me, not part of my vocabulary. I have asked him for evidence that I have said these sentences to whom.

Nature's reputation was already looking rather damaged, what with the "denialists" editorial and all. This kind of thing is hardly going to help.

Schiermeier on climate uncertainties

Quirin Schiermeier has an article in Nature on the uncertainties in climate science, which will interest many readers. It tends to reiterate lines of argument that are familiar to anyone who has followed the pronouncements of the Hockey Team in recent years. This is hardly surprising when one looks at who he chose to interview - Gavin Schmidt, Jonathan Overpeck, Gabriele Hegerl, Susan Solomon, Hans von Storch, and an economist called Leonard Smith.

Not a sceptic among them and four of them being Hockey Team members.

There are many points of interest. For example, Schiermeier claims that the divergence problem is restricted to "a few northern hemisphere sites", directly contradicting Keith Briffa who has referred to it as "a widespread problem" in the NH. Schiermeier also tries to defend the Nature "trick", although perhaps without quite the certainty that Jones' defenders have had in the past. "It could have been done better", seems to be the current preferred line for those who would try to justify hiding things from politicians.

Nature on respect for adversaries

Hot on the heels of Nature's editorial damning "denialists" comes these words of advice from the editorial staff at that august journal.

And scientists should be careful not to disparage those on the other side of a debate: a respectful tone makes it easier for people to change their minds if they share something in common with that other side.

Sorry, it seems, is still the hardest word to say.

IJoC to institute new data policy

Progess is glacial, but is nevertheless in the right direction - this in today from Professor Hardaker at the Royal Meterological Society in response to my query as to how the RMS publications committee had decided to address the issue of availability of data and code.

The Scientific Publications Committee did agree that the Society should formalise its policy for all of its journals on this and that the spirit of the policy should be to make available supporting information and data where possible within the licensing and copyright rules – we think this follows best practice.  The Committee have asked me to finalise a draft policy for their approval at the next meeting.

The devil will be in the detail of course, but at first sight "supporting information and data" might well be construed as covering data, intermediate results and code. Let's hope so. It will also be interesting to see if they adopt a policy of demanding all this information up front, or if they go for the normal physical science journal approach of making information "available upon request". I hope they don't choose the latter, a sure recipe for conflict in the future, but we will have to wait and see.

Who would be in Professor Hardaker's shoes?

As the Climategate analysis starts to flow from Steve McIntyre's keyboard, it's interesting to note the theme of "climategatekeeping" emerging from the first few posts. It seems clear that there have been multiple instances of attempts to suppress or delay sceptic papers and just as many examples of warmist papers being rushed through to print on the nod. This angle to the climategate affair has been given added impetus in recent days by the extraordinary revelations of Spenser and Christy in their American Thinker article, showing how the journal editor at the International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) conspired with Hockey Team members to delay the appearance in print of a sceptic paper (Douglass et al).

IJoC, which is a journal of the Royal Meteorological Society of the UK,

Click to read more ...

Mann in the WSJ

Michael Mann has an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he describes the accusation that he plotted to keep sceptics out of the scientific literature as "false".

Society relies upon the integrity of the scientific literature to inform sound policy. It is thus a serious offense to compromise the peer-review system in such a way as to allow anyone—including proponents of climate change science—to promote unsubstantiated claims and distortions. The good news is that it is not happening today in relation to either climate scientists or the deniers of climate science.

His case is seriously undermined by his failure to explain the contradictory evidence in the emails.

Hans von Storch interview

English translation here:

It appears from the so-called CRU-Mails that the cartel has sinned against a basic scientific principle namely the principle of transparency. Science should be practiced openly. All published results should in principle be verifiable, should be open to criticism, also to criticism from people who are not well-meaning. That is something a scientist must accept, that people who are not well-meaning scrutinize him.

The e-mails from CRU indicate that there have been attempts to keep people from publishing
by contacting authors or publishers, that one lead author of the IPPC has at the least  expressed the thought of keeping certain persons out of the whole process and lastly, and possibly the worst, that the data on which their research is based has not been put into the open for verification. This is not acceptable.

More evidence of gatekeeping

The news that a Russian think tank has accused the CRU of cooking the books has been doing the rounds of the internet. The other intriguing angle to this story though was further evidence of climate sceptic papers being illegitimately rejected by reviewers. Here Phil Jones reports to Mann what he has done.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Now, someone has identified themselves as being the authors of one of the papers concerned. Commenting at Climate Audit, Lars Kamel says this:

One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.

It will be interesting to see if Kamel's paper on CRU's handling of Siberian temperatures was valid, or if Jones rejected it simply because it disagreed with him. I wonder if we can get hold of Jones' review? The second part of Kamel's point is important though. This suggests that at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.

Another scientist has been speaking out on the same issue. Dutch professor, Arthur Rorsch, is making further allegations of misdeeds by climatologists. In an article entitled "Sick science" he explains how difficult it was for sceptics to get published.

"It is exactly as we feared.   If I were to submit an article from a friendly colleague who wanted to publish in a scientific journal, we would always get a rejection; without proper  argumentation. I was not the only Dutch researcher that happened to. Climate skeptics everywhere ran into brick walls.  

He describes the emails as demonstrating an intent to deceive and has this to say of the state of climatology:

This is no longer genuine science.  These are politically motivated people...it is a religion, or rather, a belief.

Update on Dec 17, 2009 by Bishop Hill

The other paper appears to be Aufhammer et al. This second paper, interestingly has some of the Climate Audit regulars cooing with appreciation of what a good study it is.

Update: Aufhammer has now commented and says it's a simple case of a good paper being rejected - bad stuff happens, in other words.  He does say that one of the original reviewers had very strong opinions against it, so I'm not convinced this takes away from the original point that much - climatologists were still trying to reject papers for invalid reasons.

Has Nature overstepped the mark?

I just had this comment on the previous thread about Nature's disgusting editorial on the Climategate emails:

As an active palaeoclimate scientist and also someone who has published in Nature I am deeply disturbed by this editorial. I have written to the editor and cancelled my subscription. There is no room in science for such closed minds. I fear that the editorial is now running behind the pack. By all accounts there is every chance the UEA investigation will be thorough and watching the Vice-Chancellor on television this evening he certainly was very careful to not defend CRU.

Update on Dec 3, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Pielke Jnr also thinks they may have overstepped the mark. His commenters are pretty appalled too.

Why won't Nature link to Climate Audit?

Some time ago I wrote a piece in which I questioned the wisdom of Nature's approach to blogging, and in particular to the way their climate science site, Nature Climate Feedback, seemed to be turning into something of an advocacy site. I questioned the commercial wisdom of being seen to side so publicly in one side of a politicised debate.

The article picked up a lot of traffic from an internal blog within the Nature organisation, but my impression has been that there has been little change in the way Climate Feedback operates in the six months since I attempted to highlight the problem.

Today, I'm going to point to a further example of how Nature has set its stall out as an environmentalist advocacy site - who do they link to? Apart from a list of official sites, Climate Feedback has a standard blogroll which I reproduce below:

• A Few Things Ill Considered
• AMS Climate Policy blog
• FPA Climate blog
• Gristmill
• Nature Newsblog
• Prometheus
• Real Climate
• Science Blogs
• Scitizen
• Stoat
• The Heat is Online
• The Intersection

Most readers of this site will know many of these blogs. Anyone who follows the global warming debate will be aware of Real Climate. Some may even be aware that it seems to be linked with green advocacy groups. But it is unarguably written by climate scientists, so there can be no reasonable objection to its inclusion.

The Heat is Online, however, is the webpage of Ross Gelbspan, whose Wikipedia entry refers to him as an author and activist. A Few Things Ill Considered is a "Layman's take on the science of global warming" and features "a guide on how to speak to a climate skeptic". Gristmill is part of an environmentalist publishing organisation. Clearly then, Nature Climate Feedback has no issue in linking to people whose only role in the global warming debate is one of advocacy. They also don't think that their blogroll should be restricted to qualified climate scientists. In fact, they seem quite happy to link to people who are not scientists at all.

How then can we explain the failure to link to any sites which might be considered somewhat sceptical of the AGW (alleged) consensus? Roger Pielke for example, or Climate Audit?

Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit is the only site which can rival Real Climate for traffic, and it is streets ahead on the quality of the scientific discussion. It also has a very good standard of comments from a range of highly-qualified visitors. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of people who I have been able to identify as people with relevant qualifications who have contributed to the CA conversation:

• John Christy, U Alabama Huntsville
• Eduardo Zorita
• Roger Pielke Snr, U Colorado
• Rob Wilson, U St Andrews
• "Eli Rabett" (Prof Joshua Halpern)
• David E Black
• Dr. Anthony Lupo, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Missouri-Columbia
• Tim Ball
• Yang Bao
• Lubos Motls
• Louis Scuderi (Assoc Prof, Univ New Mexico)
• Martin Juckes, British Atmospheric Data Centre
• Keith McGuinness, Ecologist Charles Darwin U, Australia
• Sinan Unur, economist Cornell U
• Ross McKitrick economist U Guelph
• Isaac Held, NOAA
• Peter Webster, Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Georgia Tech
• Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Staffan Lindstrom, Lunds University
• Sonia Boehmer-Christiansen, U Hull
• James Elsner, Florida State University
• Richard Telford, University of Bergen
• Demetris Koutsouyannis, U Athens
• Ian Castles, Asia School of Economics and Government, Australian National University, Canberra
• David Pannell, Professor, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics , U Western Australia
• Paul Dennis, UEA
• David Wratt, NIWA
• Gerald North, U Wisconsin and chairman of the NAS panel on the "Hockey Stick"
• and lastly Prof Bjorn Malmgren, Goteborgs U, who left the following comment:

By the way, I am an avid reader of Climate Audit, so from me you receive a proper response. In fact, I download the articles to my cell phone and read them with great interest every day. Many thanks for so relentlessly contributing these articles to Climate Audit.

Whichever way you look at it, there is every shade of opinion in the list, from the firm skepticism of say, Tim Ball, to the out and out enviropmentalism of Martin Juckes (who allegedly manages to combine dispassionate climate science research with his campaigning for the Green party). Climate Audit is indisputably the place where people go to have free debate on climate science. And in passing, we can compare this unfavourably with Real Climate, where the "canon" is recited to those willing to listen and straw men are cast down to the applause of the assembled faithful.

It's therefore pretty hard to explain Climate Feedback's failure to link to Climate Audit, until you look at who they do link to, at which point you wonder if Nature, once powerhouse in the advancement of scientific knowledge, is now just a rather insignificant part of the worldwide green advocacy industry. How the mighty are fallen.  

Nature blogs

MacMillan Nature group now has a really quite impressive web presence - at least in terms of volume. Their head honcho, Richard Charkin, is a blogger and what's more he's a real one too. He actually seems to write the posts himself, and does (for a corporate bod) dangerous things like offering the occasional opinion. He looks like a good man to have in charge of a publishing business when things are changing so quickly.

Under his tutelage, the group has started up a plethora of blogs (or "clogs" as EU Referendum likes to call corporate blogs) covering every subject from peer review to avian flu. (There's a song in there somewhere). This is admirable, but the group still gives the impression of not really having found its feet in the online world. There are also some pretty large risks they are running, and I'm not sure that they are playing their cards very cleverly. More of that later.

First though, why do I think they're not quite on the ball as regards blogging? I've subscribed to a couple of their blogs - one on peer review and also Nature Climate Feedback. The first thing to say is that content is a little thin on the ground. If you want a popular blog it's pretty much a given that you have to update it regularly, if not daily. Only the very best bloggers manage to buck this trend. Comments on Nature blogs are also pretty much moderated to death. I left a comment on the Peer to Peer blog shortly after it opened. This was not actually published until after I'd had an email correspondence with the site administrator which lasted the best part of a week - it was a friendly correspondence, for sure, but why didn't they just post the comment straight away? Another comment which I posted on Monday night was finally published today, more than 24 hours later. This is not the way to stimulate an interesting debate. It rather smacks of the way science was conducted in the nineteenth century, when you put your correspondence in the mail and it was delivered by packet steamer. It just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Nature's web tech site, Nascent, has pulled in fully 164 comments in the 18 months since its first posting. Climate Feedback, being in such a controversial area, really ought to be their showpiece site, but has managed to pull in just 150 comments in three months. This all suggests that the punters are being turned off.

It's a tricky situation for Nature. It's not clear how the group intends to monetise their web presence. Most people out there are relying on getting lots and lots of eyeballs on their web presence in order to do this. This is fine for people like DK or Instapundit who can be opinionated, but Nature has a much more difficult tightrope to walk. Its whole commercial reputation relies as being seen as a neutral umpire in matters scientific. If it were seen to take sides in a debate, it might get away for it for a while, but eventually it would end up backing the wrong horse in one race or another, and then its reputation would be shot. It has to be very careful about getting into the news and opinion game.

A couple of examples:

In Nature Reports: Climate Change, which is a climate focused site of which the Climate Feedback blog forms a part,  Amanda Leigh Haag writes about a possible successor to the Kyoto Treaty. In it,  she cites the following:

• Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist and climate-policy expert at Princeton University in New Jersey,
• John Drexhage, director of climate change and energy programs at the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Ontario, Canada,
• Rob Bradley, director of international climate policy at the World Resources Institute, in Washington DC,
• Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, based in Arlington, Virginia,
• Roger Pielke Jr, a climate-policy expert at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
• Saleemul Huq of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development

Now if you are going to take virtually all of your quotes directly from current and former staffers of environmental pressure groups (the exception is Pielke), you run the risk of people thinking that your publication is not actually a science site, or even just a news site, but is in fact just another arm of the environmental campaigning movement. You might perhaps think that this is an admirable thing to be. But many of your readers will not, and they may well stop reading both your websites and your scientific journals.

Another example is this post by Olive Heffernan, who is the editor in charge of Climate Feedback. In it she lambasts Czech president Vaklav Klaus' recent article in which he says that there is a risk to liberty from the demands of environmentalists. She decries his lack of qualifications as a climate expert by way of denouncing his views, although she is herself a zoologist by training. These kind of opinions are fine in general. It's fairly easy to take pot-shots at them, and if the comments cleared moderation in less than 24 hours I might do so more often - but that's not the point. When they come from a Nature employee the situation is rather different. Can a Nature editor really be seen to publicly take one side like this? Heffernan not only has a go at Klaus, but also at Richard Lindzen who is, if nothing else, a professional climatologist. These are Nature's customers for heavens sake. You can't go slagging them off just because they disagree with you, Olive. Should prospective Nature authors be asking themselves if their views are acceptable to the group before they submit their manuscripts?

It would be a pity if Nature were found to have spoken out in favour of the global warming enthusiasts and to have published junk science on their behalf, as well as having ridiculed the skeptics. It just wouldn't look very clever, would it?

I don't think all is lost though. The climate debate is largely conducted at Climate Audit and Real Climate and there is a real lack of communication between the two sides. There could be a very exciting role for Climate Feedback in umpiring a proper debate between the two sides. It could be wonderful to read, useful for the advancement of science, and cut a huge amount of risk out of the Nature business model. I imagine the moderators calling in expert advice - say a statistician when the conversation turned to matters statistical - in order to force people to address the arguments of their opponents rather than the usual ad-hominems and evasions which characterise most online argument.

First though they would have to admit that there is a debate at all, so I'm not holding my breath.

Update 21 June 2007: Welcome to readers from nurture.nature.com! I hope you find the posting useful.