Thursday, January 21, 2010

Question to International Journal of Climatology

In 2009, the American thinker reported some events related to a publication in the Inetrnational Journal of Climatology (see also Roger Pielke jr.'s webblog), which I found difficult to believe. When I came across this web-page, I approached the chief editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor, on 21. December 2009 and asked him: "Do you have a comment on that, possibly somewhere on your web-page, so that I may direct the readers of my new weblog 'Klimazwiebel' to this explanation and contextualisation?" Now, on 21 January 2010 I got an answer: "I will compose a response to the AT article in due course."
(corrected for clarification, 22. January 2010, HvS)

8 comments:

Charlie Martin said...

That's a lot faster than some of us get responses.

Anonymous said...

#1

Yes, it is IJC. If you go to ...
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/

and search for "Glenn McGregor", you'll find some interesting emails.

Anonymous said...

What is related in AT is, to say the least, a disgrace. It will be interesting to learn how Glenn McGregor attempts to rationalize what appears to be a certain perversion of the scientific quality-control system. Who controls the controllers?.

Marco said...

@Anonymous:
You are aware that the Douglass et al paper that resulted in this whole issue already suggests a perversion of the quality-control system? It was pretty bad, especially since they were given an updated data set, but decided to not use it (without explaining why not, I must note).
Now, errors and botched analyses enter the peer review literature all the time. How those are handled varies wildly. McGregor's handling of the matter suggests he was pretty embarrassed about publishing the Douglass et al paper. His subsequent handling may be somewhat embarrassing, too.

Anonymous said...

@Marco: I´m just an interested outsider observer to the late developments in climate science, and surely I do not have the climate science expertise to judge if the election Douglass et al. made for the data sets was -or not- correct. But, working in science myself, it appears from their AT reporting that Douglass et al. did in fact adress the reasons for their choice of data sets to IJC (see "Addendum to A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model Predictions.":
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/recent-publications.html)

As I told you I do not have the expertise required to judge their explanations, but it seems that they attempted to adress criticisms in due time (Am I wrong in this conclussion?). In this respect, I would appreciate any expert explanation as to how -and why- their reasons for data set choosing (as purported in the Addendum) are flawed. Thank you in advance for any light you want to shed over this matter.

Alfonso

Marco said...

@Alfonso:
A non-published addendum! The explanation would make sense, but only to an extent. You can't say "I think something is wrong with v1.3 (and 1.4), so I won't even show it, and tell people well after the fact why I chose not to look at it".
The flaw is thus not telling people why they used set A, and set A only. Even better would have been to show the results when using set B/C. It may (will) dilute the desired message, but let's keep the more 'skeptical' side to the same standards as they keep the 'alarmists'.

Anonymous said...

Did McGregor respond to American Thinker ?

Hans von Storch said...

I am not aware of a response, bu this does not mean that McGregor did not publish a response. Could somebody check?