Climate of the Past is 5 years old !!!!

To cheer up my disillusion over the IPCC authors list, (I am concerned about the possibilities for groupthink and woollythink**), and inspired by Stoat's post about citations, this is just to say that there is more to science than citations - and that the citations prove it!

Yes CP is 5 years old. How do I know? I got 4 emails telling me: one each because I've authored, reviewed and edited for CP and also one because I am chief-editor of another EGU journal. So, I think it is almost certainly true that it is indeed 5 years old. Their impact factor is 3.86. This means that, on average, each paper has had 3.86 citations (over a 3 year(?) period). This is a pretty darn good score for a journal. The screenshot below (click it to see it bigger) is taken from the ISI web of knowledge, and shows the citation report for CP. What's so brill about this? Well, 5 out of the top 10 cited papers are in a special issue that I got going and co-edited (I personally edited 3 of the top 5). This special issue resulted from an EGU session that I instigated. I suppose you might argue that it made no difference to science because people would have written their papers anyway, but it it delights me to suffer under the illusion that it could be that I helped science to progress a bit.

**I'm dissillusioned because I feel that I see too many familiar names. On the bright side there is quite a lot of new blood too. Hopefully it is enough, but I don't see why all the authors don't change each time. After all, as Stoaty has just pointed out it has there are as many as 1337 competent climate scientists all eager to do the job. Rather like politics and the "career politicians " who have done nothing but politics since they graduated, we are developing "career IPCC authors". Authoring the IPCC should be a one off public duty type thing, not a career builder. They didn't think very straight last time (this paper was our response to their 1st draft), and I hate that our science ends up being so often dragged into correcting their trivial errors, when instead we should be forging ahead with new stuff.