From	Tom Wigley	Date	Wed, 23 Apr 2003 23:53:38 -0600
To	Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Mike Hulme, Keith Briffa, James Hansen, Danny Harvey, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Robert wilby, Michael E. Mann, Thomas R Karl, Stephen H Schneider, Tom Crowley, Jonathan T. Overpeck, simon.shackley, Timothy Carter, Pim Martens, Whetton, Peter, c.goodess, a.minns, Wolfgang Cramer, j.salinger, simon.torok, Mark Eakin, Scott Rutherford, Neville Nicholls, ray bradley, Mike MacCracken, Barrie Pittock, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, R K Pachauri, Greg.Ayers
Subject	My turn
Dear friends, [Apologies to those I have missed who have been part of this email exchange -- although they may be glad to have been missed] I think Barrie Pittock has the right idea -- although there are some unique things about this situation. Barrie says .... (1) There are lots of bad papers out there (2) The best response is probably to write a 'rebuttal' to which I add .... (3) A published rebuttal will help IPCC authors in the 4AR. ____________________ Let me give you an example. There was a paper a few years ago by Legates and Davis in GRL (vol. 24, pp. 2319-1222, 1997) that was nothing more than a direct and pointed criticism of some work by Santer and me -- yet neither of us was asked to review the paper. We complained, and GRL admitted it was poor judgment on the part of the editor. Eventually (> 2 years later) we wrote a response (GRL 27, 2973-2976, 2000). However, our response was more that just a rebuttal, it was an attempt to clarify some issues on detection. In doing things this way we tried to make it clear that the original Legates/Davis paper was an example of bad science (more bluntly, either sophomoric ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation). Any rebuttal must point out very clearly the flaws in the original paper. If some new science (or explanations) can be added -- as we did in the above example -- then this is an advantage. _____________________________ There is some personal judgment involved in deciding whether to rebut. Correcting bad science is the first concern. Responding to unfair personal criticisms is next. Third is the possible misrepresentation of the results by persons with ideological or political agendas. On the basis of these I think the Baliunas paper should be rebutted by persons with appropriate expertise. Names like Mann, Crowley, Briffa, Bradley, Jones, Hughes come to mind. Are these people willing to spend time on this? _______________________________ There are two other examples that I know of where I will probably be involved in writing a response. The first is a paper by Douglass and Clader in GRL (vol. 29, no. 16, 10.1029/2002GL015345, 2002). I refereed a virtually identical paper for J. Climate, recommending rejection. All the other referees recommended rejection too. The paper is truly appalling -- but somehow it must have been poorly reviewed by GRL and slipped through the net. I have no reason to believe that this was anything more than chance. Nevertheless, my judgment is that the science is so bad that a response is necessary. The second is the paper by Michaels et al. that was in Climate Research (vol. 23, pp. 1–9, 2002). Danny Harvey and I refereed this and said it should be rejected. We questioned the editor (deFreitas again!) and he responded saying ..... The MS was reviewed initially by five referees. ... The other three referees, all reputable atmospheric scientists, agreed it should be published subject to minor revision. Even then I used a sixth person to help me decide. I took his advice and that of the three other referees and sent the MS back for revision. It was later accepted for publication. The refereeing process was more rigorous than usual. On the surface this looks to be above board -- although, as referees who advised rejection it is clear that Danny and I should have been kept in the loop and seen how our criticisms were responded to. It is possible that Danny and I might write a response to this paper -- deFreitas has offered us this possibility. ______________________________ This second case gets to the crux of the matter. I suspect that deFreitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that 'anti-greenhouse' science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on). The peer review process is being abused, but proving this would be difficult. The best response is, I strongly believe, to rebut the bad science that does get through. _______________________________ Jim Salinger raises the more personal issue of deFreitas. He is clearly giving good science a bad name, but I do not think a barrage of ad hominem attacks or letters is the best way to counter this. If Jim wishes to write a letter with multiple authors, I may be willing to sign it, but I would not write such a letter myself. In this case, deFreitas is such a poor scientist that he may simply disappear. I saw some work from his PhD, and it was awful (Pat Michaels' PhD is at the same level). ______________________________ Best wishes to all, Tom.