The Policy Lass

There’s a recent news story that demands attention. It’s covered in today’s Real Climate posting, The unnoticed melt, which contains both bad news and some good.

The good news is that it would be possible to stop the death-spiral of Arctic sea ice loss, given appropriate reductions in CO2. The bad news is that it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.

Here’s an excerpt from the RC article on how important the early melt is when considering the overall stability of the sea ice:

“…a major loss of sea ice during the early summer months is climatologically more important than a record minimum in September. This importance of sea-ice evolution during the early summer months is directly related to the role of sea ice as an efficient cooling machine: Because of its high albedo (reflectivity), sea ice reflects most of the incoming sunlight and helps to keep the Arctic cold throughout summer. The relative importance of this cooling is largest when days are long and the input of solar radiation is at its maximum, which happens at the beginning of summer. If, like this year, sea-ice extent becomes very low already at that time, solar radiation is efficiently absorbed throughout all summer by the unusually large areas of open water within the Arctic Ocean. Hence, rather than being reflected by the sea ice that used to cover these areas, the solar radiation warms the ocean there and thus provides a heat source that can efficiently melt the remaining sea ice from below. In turn, additional areas of open water are formed that lead to even more absorption of solar radiation. This feedback loop, which is often referred to as the ice-albedo feedback, also delays the formation of new sea ice in autumn because of the accompanying surplus in oceanic heat storage.”

In the early spring and summer, existing sea ice acts to reflect sunlight. When melt is quick and early, there is less sea ice to have the mentioned ice-albedo effect. This leads to increased melt and is a feedback. So folks who look to September records as their metric for the health of the Arctic sea ice shouldn’t feel comforted if record lows are not met, especially if early melt hits records. Which it has, reaching record lows in June and July, and second place for August.

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Denizens of the climate blogosphere will be familiar with Dr. Roy Spencer, who along with William D. Braswell, recently published an article titled “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” in an obscure open source journal Remote Sensing.   

Much ado was made of it at the time in the climate denialosphere, such as this post at Forbes.com which proclaims “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole in Global Warming Alarmism”.

But wait — what’s that I see?

Turns out that the paper was stinky, as Skeptical Science points out, and as discussed at Real Climate here.

Also turns out that the peer review process was inadequate, so much so that the Editor of Remote Sensing, Wolfgang Wagner, has resigned as a result.

Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published. After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing.

ETA: It’s a very thoughtful editorial. Here is the key part:

“…the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal. This regrettably brought me to the decision to resign as Editor-in-Chief―to make clear that the journal Remote Sensing takes the review process very seriously.”

The Guardian broke the story here:

Wagner, who is the head of the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing at the Vienna University of Technology, added he “would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements”.

Wagner specifically referred to headlines such as “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism” on the Forbes magazine website and “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” on Foxnews.com, which both attracted considerable attention online.

The paper in question – which, Wagner says, was downloaded 56,000 times within one month after its publication in July, as a result of the attention it attracted – purported to show how the Earth’s atmosphere is more efficient at releasing energy into space than is programmed into the computer models used to forecast climate change.

The BBC coverage is here. An excellent summary posted by Greg Laden here:

A study published in late July made false claims and was methodologically flawed, but still managed to get published in a peer reviewed journal. The Editor-in-Chief of that journal has resigned to symbolically take responsibility for the journal’s egregious error of publishing what is essentially a fake scientific paper, and to “protest against how the authors [and others] have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions” taking to task the University of Alabama’s press office, Forbes, Fox News and others.

Barry Bickmore writers about it here. Peter Gleick writes here. Joe Romm here. Tim Lambert here.

Just to refresh your memories, what was the conclusion of the Usual Suspects back in the day, such as Forbes?

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The NSF OIG has concluded its review and has found no evidence that any of the claims of research misconduct against climate scientist Michael Mann had any basis in fact.

Here is the text from the document, which you can read at this link:

OIG Review

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL OFFICE OF INVESTIGATIONS

CLOSEOUT MEMORANDUM

We fully examined both the University Inquiry and Investigation Reports. Although the Inquiry Report dismissed three of the four allegations, we examined each de novo under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. That regulation, consistent with the policy of the Office of Science and Technology Polici, defines research misconduct as plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification (45 CFR § 689.1 ).

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