Thursday, November 15, 2007

Kooks' corner

Those of you who care about the reputation of the AGU may be concerned at what they have allowed to happen to JGR-Atmospheres:

Global Warming and the Next Ice Age
Journal of Geophysical Research, VOL. 112, NO. D24, 2007
Guest Editor(s): P. Chylek


So that explains how Schwartz got published in the first place. Actually I had the dubious pleasure of reviewing another article out of this collection. It took me all of 5 minutes to spot the mistake, and little longer to write the review which explained it in simple terms. I declined the offer to look at a revised version, so it is not impossible that the published paper will be better, but I am not holding my breath.

Who needs Energy and Environment when JGR will publish this stuff anyway?

Of course I shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush: there are probably some good papers in this issue, maybe even most of them. But Chylek, Essex, Scafetta and West at least all have previous form, and we've shown that the Schwartz paper was wrong. I wonder how many more comments this Special Issue of JGR will provoke?

6 comments:

Marion Delgado said...

James, the problem is denialism-wise Schwarz is the thin edge of the wedge. He no doubt had idiosyncratic reasons for thinking a straight-line model was sufficient, he's wrong, but there it is, and he's not just some utter flake out in left field.

So, yeah, this is ominous.

James Annan said...

Schwartz seems to have a bit of a history of niggling at the IPCC (eg here) - something in principle I have some sympathy for :-)

It would be unfortunate if the strong criticism his work has provoked were to push him more firmly over to the septic side but OTOH scientists need to deal with reality first and personal feelings second. I await with interest to see what response, if any, he provides to our comment (I have not yet seen anything).

William M. Connolley said...

Not having read any of the papers, my first thought is that few of them seem to have a strong connection to "the next ice age"

James Annan said...

Perhaps one of the "Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends" is that we are actually entering an ice age right now but haven't noticed :-)

Hank Roberts said...

So: "We find the empirical climate sensitivity to be between 0.29 and 0.48 K/Wm−2 when aerosol direct and indirect radiative forcing is included."
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007JD008740.shtml

Google's crosstime search feature got me to this thread even before the information I'm looking for gets typed in.

I'll wait patiently for someone who can read the whole article, not just the publicly available abstract, to explain.

James Annan said...

I'll blog it at some point. Yes, it's wrong. Whether or not it provokes any comments is not yet clear...perhaps not, since it's been ignored by the press.