Monday, April 13, 2009

Comment on "Aerosol radiative forcing and climate sensitivity deduced from the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition", by P. Chylek and U. Lohmann

It's now finally published and can be found here.

We did get a comment from C&L which can be found here, which seemed to us like a rather weak attempt at a misdirection. They bring up the point that they used a range of temperatures, rather than a single value - a point that we were well aware of, having already replicated their analysis - but did not address the rather more important issue that the temperature ranges they calculated were based on extreme outliers in the noisy data set (which were not even contemporaneous with the extreme outliers they used for the dust values).

You can judge for yourselves how taxing a task it would have been for the GRL editor to continue to deal with this manuscript in the usual manner rather than deciding (as I mentioned here) that it was all too much like hard work after getting a set of reviews. I can only imagine that the reason the original paper got published in the first place is that none of the original reviewers even considered the possibility that C&L might have done something so startlingly inappropriate in their selection of data points, and did not think the calculation actually needed checking in detail.

8 comments:

David B. Benson said...

Who are C & L?

Lordy...

James Annan said...

Just Chylek and Lohmann, as in "Aerosol radiative forcing and climate sensitivity deduced from the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition", by P. Chylek and U. Lohmann :-)

David B. Benson said...

Well yes, James, I sorta managed to figure that out. :-)

Trying again, who are P. Chylek and U. Lohmann to blunder so thoroughly?

That's what the "lordy" was supposed to indicate.

James Annan said...

Oh sorry, I thought it was some sort of a TMA complaint :-)

Chylek is an aerosol and remote sensing specialist, perhaps may be considered in a similar vein to Schwartz, albeit with more "form" in terms of climate scepticism. I think in part it is a belief that aerosols are really important that drives them.

I understand that Lohmann is a well respected atmospheric scientist who does not seem to have a history of such behaviour, although she seems to be going downhill recently - this paper is also bollocks, but I really shouldn't waste my time writing another comment...

The term "going emeritus" may be appropriate but that is speculation.

C W Magee said...

"I can only imagine that the reason the original paper got published in the first place is that none of the original reviewers even considered the possibility that C&L might have done something so startlingly inappropriate in their selection of data points"

Traditionally, science is reviewed under the assumption that it was done in good faith. I've never re-reduced data as a reviewer.

James Annan said...

Sure, although in this case it did not take much digging to work out where they had gone wrong - the text and figure was enough for me to work it out (although I still checked directly as I couldn't quite believe it).

EliRabett said...

I am increasingly impressed by the review process at Climate of the Past. I have seen the future and this may be it.

James Annan said...

Glad to hear you've come round (IIRC you were a bit sceptical previously). I presume you'll be using ACP(D) for your forthcoming magnum opus on G&T :-)