The Current Wisdom: Un‐​learned Lessons of Climategate

To practicing scientists, the most significant revelation in the November 2009 stack of purloined University of East Anglia emails known worldwide now as “Climategate” were the plans to harass editors of refereed scientific journals who accepted papers from the (erroneously labeled) climate “skeptics.” There was also disturbing evidence of collusion between the some of the Climategate principals and more agreeable editors.

See for yourself, as revealed in the emails. Here are a few highlights. The first refers to Geophysical Research Letters (“GRL”), and was sent on January 20, 2005.

The exchange shows key scientists discussing removing journal editors who allowed papers to be published that disagreed with their findings or methodology. They identify the suspect editors in question and then suggest collecting data on their activities to potentially be used in getting them ousted.

There is also discussion about boycotting (i.e. “do an end run around”) the offending journals. And when all else fails, they attempt to “redefine” what they consider to be the peer‐​reviewed literature.

These shenanigans prompted waves of nausea both within and outside of the climate community. So, has the lesson been learned that maybe it’s not a good idea to go beyond the normal rules of scientific civility and to actually cultivate a bit of climate science diversity?

No. Consider the developments since our last Current Wisdom article, “Please Sell Me Your Beach House.”

I was an author of a recently published a paper in Journal of Geophysics Research‐​Atmospheres, which examined the magnitude current ice melt taking in Greenland compared with a statistical estimate of what has taken place there for the past 225 years. We were able to go back to the late 18th century because of a remarkable record of weather stations established by the Danish colonists.

We concluded that while the melt in recent years was quite high, it probably wasn’t unprecedented. JGR uses a single‐​blind review process—that is, there were three reviewers who were anonymous to us, but they knew who we were. The double‐​blind review processes, while common in other disciplines, and relatively rare in climate science, which is probably one of the systematic problems in the discipline that created an atmosphere primed for Climategate‐​like storms. The fact that editors have not changed this policy in light of the Climategate emails is an ominous portent.

After our paper was published, one of the previously anonymous reviewers revealed himself through a blog entry on his website. This individual was Dr. Jason Box, geography professor at Ohio State University who has done a lot of work on the Greenland ice, and was therefore well‐​qualified to review our work (and in fact, was one of the people that we suggested to JGR as a potential reviewer of our paper). His blog entry was not about how a paper that he recently reviewed perhaps shed some new light on the longer term history of ice melt across Greenland, but instead was highly (to put it mildly) critical of our results as well as the review process at JGR, and for good measure, as if it was somehow relevant to the science in our paper, decided to trot out the old “denialism” war horse and to explain that he, Box, is “inspired by scientific denialism.”

Here are some excerpts from Box’s blog posts titled “selective science=pseudo science”:

Jason Box is naming the responsible editors at JGR, saying that the peer‐​review process there failed, and then pointing out what evil people the authors are especially when compared to himself. What the latter has to do with the former is unclear, unless he is somehow trying to slip in that Liu and Pryor are potential denialist sympathizers.

So much for the lessons of Climategate.

Judith Curry is the Head of the Earth and Atmospheric Science department at Georgia Tech, who runs a very popular climate science blog. Her take on all of this is very interesting:

Regarding editor Gusheng Liu:

On Box’s reaction:

The “important new data” that Box said we were evading is the 2010 melt data. It is a combination of records from three different sources, which are not even available until late in the following year.

In fact, because this paper was so long in the review process (for reasons that should be obvious), we had to revise it by including 2008 and 2009 data.

We also would like to assure Dr. Box, who surely knows this, that inclusion of 2010 data, which, from preliminary data, appears to be a very high melt year (but not significantly different from other high ones) would in fact have strengthened our results. The more data one has, especially at the extremes, the more robust the subsequent model is.

At any rate Climategate lives on. Now, as then, any editor who dares to publish anything that does not imply the end‐​of‐​the‐​world‐​as‐​we‐​know‐​it‐​pronto risks loss of confidentiality or worse. “You’ve been warned. Back off. Once these people are mad, honest, I can’t control them.”

What an awful profession climate science has become.