Sunday, August 15, 2010

"Even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is".

The title of this piece refers to a quote in one of the Climategate emails by Professor Phil Jones, when discussing papers by Steve McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick as well as another by Dr. Chris De Freitas. Now that there have been three enquiries to whitewash away any damage done by these emails to the reputations of the CRU and Professor Jones we find the same thing happening again. Dr. Ross McKitrick writes on his blog:

SURFACE TEMPERATURES: In 2007 I published a paper with Pat Michaels showing evidence that CRU global surface temperature data used by the IPCC are likely contaminated due to socioeconomic development and variations in data quality. In 2008 Gavin Schmidt published a paper in the International Journal of Climatology claiming our results, as well as those of de Laat and Maurellis who independently found the same things we did, were spurious. My rebuttal, coauthored with Nicolas Nierenberg, was submitted to the IJOC in April 2009. We found out in February that it has been rejected. Interestingly, it turns out that the IJOC had sent Schmidt's paper, which focuses on defending Phil Jones' CRU data against its various critics, to be reviewed by none other than Phil Jones of the CRU. As you can imagine the review was rather enthusiastic and uncritical. The IJOC didn't ask deLaat or me to supply a review, nor did they invite us to contribute a response. And they have rejected the response we did submit, on the basis of some loopy referee reports to which Nico and I were not given a chance to reply (though we did anyway). Nice way they run a journal over at IJOC. The paper is being upgraded and submitted elsewhere. UPDATE: June 2010. The paper's been accepted subject to revisions. Details to come.

So sadly the saga and the manipulation by the alarmists continues.