I have a comment in moderation at RC.
[Response: This is the most bizarre thing I’ve heard yet. Is there really anything else to say? — eric]
There is something else to say. You can say whether or not you are reviewer A. Or you can decline to say. But saying yes or no would shed some light on things.
Recall I wrote
Also, someone in comments suggested that we might still want further confirmation Steig is reviewer A. If Steig is not reviewer A there would be nothing disingenuous with any of these statements.
I have been watching RC and other blogs to see whether Steig or anyone has denied Steig is Reviewer A. I am monitoring to see if anyone else steps forward identifying themselves as reviewer A. Has anyone read anything to suggest RyanO was mis-understood Steig and in fact, Steig is not reviewer A? Anything reported at Stoat, Deltoid, Rabett, Tobis? The Journals?
It appears we know that Steig was a reviewer, and RyanO suspects he is reviewer A. Meanwhile, people are asking Steig various questions over at RC. I was rather amazed no one asked him whether he was reviewer A.
NowI have.
Like everything at RC, it starts out in moderation. As I noted in comments of my previous post– maybe Steig will turn out to be Reviewer D. Or B, or C. Currently, we don’t know. Obviously Steig doesn’t need to tell us, but he could if he wished. For the time being, we wait to learn more.
Update 4:03 Central Time: Some have noticed that comments after mind have appeared. Bear in mind someone who does not know the answer may be moderating. So, we still wait. Meanwhile, people can also monitor to see if my comment appears in The Real Climate Bore Hole where some rejected comments appear. So far it hasn’t.
I asked it at RC within the first hour when it all started. My comment was:
Eric, is it true, were you the reviewer A?
But, of course, it got “moderated” and did not even appear in the bore hole. I’m sure a lot of people have asked and their comments have just been deleted… I think right now they just delete everything.
I took the screen shot because I thought it odd no one asked this directly. It occurred to me people had, but those questions were being disappeared.
If your comment had appeared, Steig could have either answered yes, no, or told us he won’t reveal this information. My comment will either come out of moderation or it won’t. Steig will either answer yes, no or he won’t reveal this information.
We wait.
Ryan O lists the reasons in his email to Steig that made him suspect Steig was a reviewer. One of these was a “striking similarity between the eigenvector retention comments and the ‘On Overfitting’ post at RC.” I read Steig’s RC post, then I read the review comments and sure enough, one reviewer stands out from the rest.
Lucia
I find it difficult to understand your lukerwarmer cold-heartedness. 🙂
.
I will support Dr Steig, even if has indeed pulled this trick. People do all kinds of stupid things and they don’t become eevil in my book simply for that reason. He is a scientist and scientists deserve our support.
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But when it comes to an argument or concept under question, a point is a point, a spade a spade, and there can be no compromises, even between friends, or even parent and child.
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Even if Steig were not Reviewer A, but just a reviewer, his behaviour is duplicitous.
It would seem that your comment didn’t make it out of moderation Lucia. There are comments from before and after that time but your comment is missing.
No surprise there…
Shub–
I consider the comment I posted from JeffId’s TAV disingenuous if he is any reviewer. He never had to write a comment that made it appear as if this paper was entirely new to him.
But the later two might fall in the realm of straightforward if he is one of the other reviewers. I will say that on first reading, I take them to give the audience the apparently false impression that Steig became aware of the paper only when it was published. That was not true– but it’s maybe not so bad.
OTOH: If he is reviewer A. That is an important bit of information. Knowing the answer would color many people’s views of this whole kerfuffle.
Bill–
Someone other than Steig may be moderating comments. That someone may not know the answer. I think we continue to wait….
Boballab, in comment #37 on the ‘Wrong is Wrong’ thread at Jeff’s Air Vent, has a compelling analysis that shows that E. Steig has already admitted to being Reviewer A.
================
Folks can also follow up with this.
Eric, Reviewer A wrote the following ‘…..’
Do you agree with this?
Getting Eric to disagree with what Reviewer A said is a fun game to play.
Also, people can just continue to ask this question ( was eric reviewer A) over and over again on the blogs.
Sandbagging Ryan was not a smart game to try
A better question is this.
Anyone who believes in AGW should try to ask the simple question at RC
Eric, reviewer A of O11 Stated the following: “The use of the ‘iridge’ procedure makes sense to me, and I suspect it really does give the best results. ” Do you agree or disagree?
Volunteers? Eli? Boris?
steven– If I were asking I would ask if he wrote that, not if he agreed or disagreed.
Whoops I just asked steve’s question over there before I saw Lucia’s
Re: kim,
You can’t “analyze” whether he admitted something. Either he admitted being reviewer A directly, or he did not. What I read in RyanO’s email is Steig admits to having been “a reviewer”. Steig later uses “the reviewer”, but it’s not absolutely crystal clear he is admitting that he is the reviewer who corresponds to those points mentioned by RyanO. It seems likely he was, and I can easily see why RyanO or anyone would think that’s what Steig meant.
But, when I read that I also find it possible that Steig used “the” when he should have used “a”.
There were 4 invited reviewers. Each should correspond to the work of 1 person (otherwise, some of the reviewers violated policy.) Based on that email, Steig was a reviewer. As far as I can see, that’s all Steig admitted.
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True!!
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He had no need for making that comment.
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I am going to take a shower now.
Lucia: out of curiosity do you know if any RC-ers read the Blackboard?
I think Lucia is right here—don’t over analyze it. We don’t know beyond any doubt that he’s Reviewer A, though the remote possibility exists than he’s another reviewer. I suspect Steig as Reviewer A would stand up in court, just on the linguistic analysis, if a challenge were made.
There’s a kind of “fingerprint” that is unique to each person’s rhetorical style, verb tenses, where they appear etc. If Steig is unwilling to confirm or deny that he’s Reviewer A (I’m sure he will not admit to it), I think we just need to take note of that and move on with the assumption that he is.
Uh, you missed the three reviews part. Sure, I agree that we still don’t know for sure without any chance of error, but Boballab’s analysis is correct, and, I suspect, right in line with Ryan’s thinking.
============
A did three reviews, B&C did two each, D did one. Ryan points to Eric as the triple reviewer.
================
Actually you can analyze it if you actually quote the full comments from the Email:
In Ryans Email to Dr. Steig there is this:
When you look at the list of Reviews that Ryan put up over at CA only one reviewer had three reviews: Reviewer A
Now what is important is not just what Dr. Steig acknowledges in his reply but what he does not question in Ryan’s email the the mention of his three reviews. Nowhere in there did Dr. Steig say, yes I was a reviewer but I didn’t review your paper three times, that was a different reviewer .
Like I said go count the reviews out:
Reviewer A – 3 times
Reviewer B and C – 2 times
and Reviewer D only once.
Dr. Steig never dispute or question Ryan about him stating that Dr. Steig reviewed their paper 3 times.
Remember Dr. Steig reply in acknowledgement was to Ryan’s specific mention of reviewing the paper 3 times and the reason why he thought Dr. Steig was that specific reviewer (Carrick’s “fingerprints”).
Kim–
I did not miss that. RyanO was trying to elicit an answer to the question “Did you write these three reviews?” but worded it different. Steig answered that he was a reviewer and did not directly state whether he wrote those three. He also did not deny writing those 3 specific reviews.
The evidence in that email strongly suggests Steig wrote those reviews, but, he also may only have been admitting to being a reviewer.
I think if people want to ask Steig question that give us meaningful information, they need to ask questions that can’t be answered based on what he thinks now — he may have changed his mind. They need to post snippets written by Reviewer A and ask if he wrote those words.
Or, they need to ask if he was Reviewer A. He can come back with something obviously evasive, like “I don’t know what letter was assigned to me and I’m not going to bother to read TAV to find out which is supposed to be Reviewer A. He can answer yes/no. Or he can refuse to answer.
They can ask things like: Were you an officially named reviewer. (The alternate theory is that someone else was the official reviewer but, in violation of rules, permitted him to write part.)
But basically– ask questions about things he did and cannot undo not things he thinks now.
Re: jack mosevich ,
I don’t know. Some might read only when I link them. Some may never read. I’m just waiting to see if my comment appears and if there is any answer. I am patient.
lucia:
Good luck on that.
Bet it doesn’t even make the borehole. They are deep-sixing the criticism.
This is what passes on that website for “discussion”.
Given that reviews are meant to be confidential and anonymous, and that these attributes are useful contributions to independence and impartiality, my guess is that Steig will neither confirm nor deny in a public forum if he is Reviewer A, and that is entirely proper.
Remember he was ‘outed’ by O’D, who broke a confidence in the process, after all men of honour do not publish correspondence without permission – as we know.
Still playing games I see, Mosh.
Phil–
Those attributes can sometimes contribute to independence and impartiality. They can equally well contributed to partiality, pal review, power plays by reviewers and all sort of other things.
Steig clearly doesn’t think it’s always wrong to tell people he was a reviewer. He told Ryan he is a reviewer of that paper. So, the question is not whether will dispense with anonymity. The question is under which circumstances he will do so, precisely how much he will reveal and whether or not he will use language that is unambiguous.
As a reviewer, I try to add my two cents worth in an attempt to make the paper better. When I know the authors of the paper and/or when I make extensive comments that go beyond grammar, I typically either sign my reviews or let the editor know that it is OK to reveal my identity to the authors. After all, I am trying to be useful, so what do I have to hide?
I would think that had Eric Steig (or any of the co-authors of his original paper) been chosen to review the O’Donnell et al. paper and accepted that task, out of common courtesy, he (they) would have let the authors know this. Not doing so would seem a bit silly, especially is they were to submit an extensive and detailed set of comments (after all, who would they be fooling).
I could see how after the paper was published, and if it were published over his objections, that he may want to write a piece (at RC or anywhere else) pointing out some of his objections (and let the discussion take off as it may).
However, that said, I would find it *extremely* unusual to point out a preference for one methodology over another if the publicly professed preferred methodology was not the one that the reviewer suggested/insisted on during the review process. This would tend to make me rather upset—as it apparently did Ryan O’Donnell.
Lost sight in all of this is that adversarial relationships are not helping science move forward at its most efficient. It is time (long overdue) for the climate scientists to realize that those outside climate science have something useful to contribute. As the internet (and blogging in particular) has opened up science and made its nitty gritty approachable to interested “non-scientists†(I realize that this is not a good term, as anyone doing science is a scientist, but I mean it to refer to folks who don’t have some sort of degree conferred upon them in the field they are commenting on), traditional “scientists†would be foolish not to embrace these new resources. I know that I have tried…and contribute to try!
The boys at Real Climate are plenty smart enough to be able to identify legitimate suggestions/comments/ideas (i.e., separate the wheat from the chafe). And instead of building up walls to keep them out, they should be reaching out as partners. Basically, although they seem to be embracing the times (via blogging), they are far too Old School for their own good. If they don’t realize this themselves, they rest of the world is at least starting to.
-Chip
Lucia, I do not judge that concentrating on proving for certain (more than establishing beyond reasonable doubt, I think) or getting a confession out of Eric Steig as the third reviewer does justice to the contrast in analysis by Steig in defending S(09) and RyanO’s replies.
I strongly suspect (from the begining) that it is Eric, but I think you get an even better picture by making the comparison I suggest above.
Chip–
I entirely agree that reviewers of a paper have every right to write a comment in response to a paper they reviewed, or write a full paper rebutting it. I also agree that criticizing the choice of methodology when they specifically endorse it in the review– and press that it be used to the extent of using the word “insist” in their reviews looks very, very bad. Even without questioning motive, it looks bad to the point that if this occurred the criticism should make clear that they too thought the method sound during the review period and encouraged its use.
Right now, I’m still waiting to see whether Steig will shed light on this by telling us whether he was “Reviewer A” or not. U Washington is on the west coast, so he may still be at work. But I think the question is straightforward enough that if my comment is sitting in moderation to permit Steig himself to answer, we should see the answer by tomorrow morning.
I also anticipate that whether or not Steig answers, we will learn the answer by some means within… oh…. a year. But that’s a guess based on the political process and news cycles. I could be wrong.
Phil Clarke:
This is a losing argument. The main purpose of the confidentiality of the reviews is to protect the authors (so other people don’t steal their work before it gets published).
If you are an author being criticized, I think you have an ethical obligation to identify yourself (allowing original authors to write anonymous reviews is BS in my opinion, and it is not something I will engage in myself).
Actually this is just “whistle blowing”.
O’Donnell blew the whistle on Steig when Steig resorted to unethical behavior. Nothing more, nothing less. Too bad for Steig that Ryan isn’t a stooge (like you), isn’t it?
Kenneth–
I judge it worth asking and seeing if we get a direct answer.
Eric is peppering comments at RC with things like this
(As if it even makes sense to make a long scientific point in a comments box.)
Phil Clarke (Comment#68516)
February 8th, 2011 at 5:27 pm
“Given that reviews are meant to be confidential and anonymous…”
Does that mean it would be unethical to circulate the manuscript being reviewed to others?
“Steig clearly doesn’t think it’s always wrong to tell people he was a reviewer. He told Ryan he is a reviewer of that paper.”
In confidence! Slightly different to posting it on a message board, no? Or is private personal communication a thing of the past? Seems to me, assuming O’D wants to be taken seriously by journal editors, blowing one of the principles of peer-review like this is a very strange way to go about it.
Anyhow, good luck with getting an answer. I am not sure much changes either way.
Emphasis mine:
It’s impossible to pin the reviews on Steig so far. However, there is more to his response:
Steig has no reason to believe that Ryan knows the identity of any OTHER reviewer, so it seems evident by Steig’s malformed caution “nor to mention that you know whom the reviewer was” that Steig is intending to conclusively answer Ryan’s query in the affirmative. Further, Steig notes “reviews” in the plural and “reviewer” in the singular. Steig is describing the activities of Reviewer A and is confirming Ryan’s suspicion.
Lucia,
“I also anticipate that whether or not Steig answers, we will learn the answer by some means within… oh…. a year. But that’s a guess based on the political process and news cycles. I could be wrong.”
Careful, in some circles, that might be considered a “threat.”
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/2/8/steig-snippets.html
JohnM– So I understand. Silly. I intend it to be a prediction.
Re: Phil Clarke (Feb 8 17:27),
“Still playing games I see, Mosh.”
as long as Steig and others want to game the publishing system, I have a problem with them having all the fun. There is enough fun to go around.
“Does that mean it would be unethical to circulate the manuscript being reviewed to others?”
As long as they agreed to ‘non disclosure’, no. Why would it?
“O’Donnell blew the whistle on Steig when Steig resorted to unethical behavior. Nothing more, nothing less”
I would need rather more context than that supplied in the selective quotes to be definitive about what actually transpired and the ethics demonstrated. But it is black and white that O’D broke his word. Since when was that ethical? Two wrongs make a right? Since when does that enhance credibility?
Phil Clarke:
Confidential information, Phil. That’s what you sit on, without sharing with people you’re not supposed to share it with. Like.. Ryan, for example. No?
Well now, if Ryan only shared the information in confidence with tAV, WUWT and CA readers, that’s surely the same thing as Eric sharing the information with Ryan in confidence. Right? Where’s the ACTUAL breach in confidence, Phil?
Yes, actually, it pretty well is. Anyone receiving government funds cannot assume privacy in the course of performing their work. This is part of their work, so there is no presumption of privacy. Neither should there be. If Ryan wanted to keep secret that he reviewed the O’Donnell paper, he should have.. yanno.. kept it secret. Duh.
Re: Phil Clarke ,
So? If a rule binds him, it binds him. Or it’s not a binding rule and it doesn’t. Or Steig gets to decide under what circumstances he thinks it binds him and when he thinks it doesn’t. He evidently sometimes thinks it doesn’t. Does the rule say, “tell whoever you want but not on a message board?”
Certainly there is a danger. I’m sure Ryan is aware of it. I suspect Steig would know that Ryan might worry about the danger. If Steig was reviewer A, maybe intended to take advantage of this worry on Ryan’s part and for that reason thought Ryan’s hands would be tied.
None of this would mitigate Steig’s behavior if he is Reviewer A.
Phil Clarke:
Not nearly as black and white as you say: Steig wasn’t forced to reveal his confidentiality, nor was holding his name confidential a precondition for revealing that confidentiality. So what word was broken here?
It’s entirely appropriately to out somebody who is behaving as outrageously poorly as Steig is.
You apparently see nothing wrong with whole sale dishonesty on the part of Steig, yet you expect us to censor Ryan for simply fighting back??? LOL, you’ve lost it (or maybe you never had it).
Urgh.. If ERIC wanted to keep secret that he reviewed the O’Donnell paper, he should have.. yanno.. kept it secret. Double Duh.
I guess it would be kind of silly to actually start quoting journal policies, wouldn’t it>?
Phil:
Again not black and white. O’Donnell is under no ethical obligation (from the point of view of the journal) to keep the name of referee’s private, when those referees have willingly volunteered their identity. Nor is there in general any policy against referees revealing their identity: I frequently do so when I review papers. And as I mentioned, the purpose of the confidentiality of the reviews is to protect the intellectual property of the authors, not to protect the reviewers.
As a reviewer, you assume everybody from kingdom come will see your review. There is no assumption of confidentiality or privacy that is assumed here on the part of referees.
Phil:
Given that reviews are meant to be confidential and anonymous, and that these attributes are useful contributions to independence and impartiality, my guess is that Steig will neither confirm nor deny in a public forum if he is Reviewer A, and that is entirely proper.
Phil, reviewers are supposed to be confidential, anonymous, and disinterested. If Steig is reviewing a paper that directly criticizes his work, that’s a conflict.
if he’s discussing a paper that was published with his vote, after making changes he’d suggested, then it’s considered good form to reveal that.
If he’s criticizing a paper about changes he’d requested, that’s beyond the pale.
Lucia,
“But I think the question is straightforward enough that if my comment is sitting in moderation to permit Steig himself to answer, we should see the answer by tomorrow morning.”
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I suspect that, just like Luca Brasi, Lucia’s comment sleeps with the fishes.
Phil Clarke (Comment#68525),
There is a real difference between asking for confidence and demanding it. Steig gave the information to Ryan O without ever asking for confidence; live and learn you know.
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Someone asks me: “Did you rob that bank?” I say “Yes, but don’t tell anyone.” So they are bound to silence? Come on Phil.
wrt to Steig being reviewer A – If he was, his comment re requesting a copy of the paper was an attempt to throw readers off the scent, or a bait and switch like tactic. A mistake? Yes. Pretty stupid? Yes, but not unlike things my parents used to pull, and not all that uncommon human behavior. Also, imo it’s not worth all this blog time.
If he wasn’t reviewer A, then this has all been even more of a waste of blog time.
We care more about the validity of analytical conclusions, yes?
OK – so now I’M wasting blog time, sorry. 🙂
BTW – How’s Mo doing?
You must have been OT Lucia. RC only respond to genuine scientific questions.
“Not nearly as black and white as you say: Steig wasn’t forced to reveal his confidentiality, nor was holding his name confidential a precondition for revealing that confidentiality. So what word was broken here?”
Erm …. Direct quote from O’d himself:-
“I have known that Eric was, indeed, Reviewer A since early December. I knew this because I asked him. When I asked, I promised that I would keep the information in confidence, ”
So a confidence is only a confidence until the confidante decides otherwise. Yeah, got that. Open and shut, live and learn indeed. Anyhoo, pinheads and angels time.
Goodnight. Enjoy.
GrantB:
LOL.
Like this exchange:
I’ve noticed the deep thinker dhogaza never has trouble getting his comments accepted into either RC or OpenMind. It must be these “straight physics” comments of his!!!
lowlz
Someone asks me: “Did you rob that bank?†I say “Yes, but don’t tell anyone.†So they are bound to silence?
Bad analogy alert! I ask ‘Are you the author of that anonymous work – if you tell me I promise to keep the secret’
‘Yes I was’
‘Hey everybody! I don’t like this book! And SteveF is the author….!’
Phil:
That’s a paraphrase from Ryan. Is it accurate?
Not according to what’s published of the exchange.
Ryan, care to clarify?
I have an idea! Let’s keep just focusing on just this issue. That way you never have to worry about dealing with Eric’s duplicity.
RC options:
1 post
2 [snip] and post
3 Borehole
4 delete
I am afraid you and many others got option 4
Ryan O,
“I have known that Eric was, indeed, Reviewer A since early December. I knew this because I asked him. When I asked, I promised that I would keep the information in confidence, â€
Is that a fair description?
Phil Clarke:
It’s not a great analogy, I agree… more like a “gentleman’s agreement. Of course, part of gentlemen’s agreements is both sides behave as gentlemen. Not that I expect a tool like you to admit that.
“Confidence” between individuals is based on mutual trust.
Unlike “confidence” required by journal policies regarding submitted manuscripts, but apparently those are off the table for now.
Anyway, it looks like Steig really ticked Ryan O off, which sort of takes mutual trust off the table too.
gcapologist: The reason it is worth all of the blog time is that Steig and others like him claim that the peer review process is a major factor that legitimizes the current climate science consensus. This blows a hole in peer review.
Dr. Steig is pistol. I LMAO when Lucia caught him quoting Pielki out of context. Not mentioning Hu in the corrigendum was classic. A little duplicity is just icing.
Carrick,
I don’t really agree with the idea that reviewer anonymity is intended to protect the author; arguably, that purpose would be better served by dropping anonymity altogether.
Reviewer anonymity is meant to protect the reviewer, so he can provide a review that is as critical as necessary without any fear of retaliation on the part of big shot authors with huge egos, and a lot of influence–like in the examples you have provided yourself. It also allows you to be quite frank and honest in your criticism of the research of casual acquaintances, former collaborators, and all sorts of people that you are going to be running into, and occasionally even working with, without damaging those professional relations.
In cases like the present, however, anonymity is preserved more for appearances’ sake: it should be obvious to anybody that referee A was, if not Steig himself, at least one of the authors of Steig’s paper. And the power structure is exactly backwards: Steig (the referee) is the big shot, and Ryan is the talented nobody. Steig has nothing to fear from Ryan, professionally or otherwise. His embarrassment (assuming he feels embarrassed) is all of his own making.
I do agree with you that it was very convenient for Steig to expect that his opponent would behave like a gentleman while he felt free to behave like a weasel. Chutzpah again.
Julio:
I’m not sure about this argument:
Suppose you had a paper in deliberation, and other people saw the review comments for the paper and said “I can do better than this”?
You’d have one heck of a mess as everybody raced to get their version in first. I’ve seen plenty of versions of this where people let slip at conferences what they’re working at only to see other people “beat them to the punch”. This would be 1000 times as bad.
Reviewer anonymity is different than confidentiality of the reviews, and it does generally allow reviewers to be able to be thorough and critical without worrying about retaliation…that is a good part of it.
However, almost nobody I know treats the reviews of their papers as anonymous, they share them with colleagues. In most cases I can think of the authors got the paper accepted or it was outright rejected before they circulated “unfair” or “high praise” reviews. This is consistent with the concept of protecting one’s intellectual property.
I don’t know anybody but Eric (who obviously was more worried about looking bad with his colleagues than “retaliation” from Ryan O) who has tried to claim that it would be inappropriate to publish the reviews of your work on line. As a former editor, perhaps you could comment on this.
Lucia, I understand your desire to give RC the satisfaction of the doubt but your comment should be approved regardless whether the reviewer knows the answer or not. It shouldn’t matter if the person doing the moderating knows the answer. If it’s not Eric doing the moderating then he can come back and provide an answer when he has time.
This comment got through moderation and there’s a presupposition that Eric IS the reviewer:
“Eric said they should address the iridge underestimation issue. They didn’t. Eric said they had failed to address the issue. They cried.”
Eric couldn’t have said those things if he wasn’t a reviewer!
“I judge it worth asking and seeing if we get a direct answer.
Eric is peppering comments at RC with things like this”
I can only speak for myself but my opinion of Eric Steig does not turn on whether he admits to being the third reviewer or was the third reviewer. I have probably had my current view of Steig rather earlier in the discussions of S(09) and O(10). My point is that RyanO’s thorough analysis of Steig’s recent defense S(09)and critiques of O(10) gives a better picture of Steig and how he thinks than would getting him to admit to being the third reviewer. In fact, RyanO put it forth almost as an aside, although a rather dramatic one.
If this discussion gets sidetracked into a pis-ing contest about whether it was honorable for Ryan to expose Steig (as the third reviewer and not as a scientist who is shy about running sensitivity tests) would be a real pity based on the effort that RyanO has put forth in his analyses. I personally think for the circumstances of this case that RyanO was honor bound to give a full accounting of what occurred between him and Steig.
Most of that honor crap about keeping secrets is most often used to protect the guilty.
Bill Jamison–
Where did Eric say they failed to address the issue? In comments at RC?
Sometimes comments saying I said something I did not say appear in my comment block and I don’t notice them. So…. I wouldn’t be absolutely positive about your conclusion. If someone else is moderating, it would be possible for a commenter to get something like that wrong and Eric not catch it.
FWIW: I think Eric almost certainly was reviewer A. I would just like to read a directly not oblique statement. Also, I think the question needs to be presented in a straight forward way. If he is not reviewer A, many of the theories about his behavior have to be modified. If the question is asked directly, we can know that it was asked and he did not answer.
torn8o:
I’m sure similar kinds of peer reviewer wars have gone on many times b4 in the geosciences. It has been part of the institution of academic publish or perish, and the race for funding well before IPCC and the internet.
I’m glad dirty laundry is being exposed, but I’m not sure all the chatter helps anyone. I think it’s probable that those who may have screwed up have now so thoroughly dug their heels in the mud, they’ll never come clean. That’s why, in this case, I see it as a waste of people’s valuable time.
I can’t say I know the best course of action from here. My hope would be some honesty from on high, say Lisa Jackson? I doubt that will happen.
When situations get out of hand, are all we are left with are the likes of Ravetz? I prefer a Pielke Jr. type of approach.
All these implosions simply suck as they don’t seem to get us anywhere.
Carrick,
Oh, I see the point. I was not reading carefully. Of course the author is under no obligation to keep the reviews of his paper confidential. It would be a different matter if the reviewer was not anonymous–presumably he could claim the review as his intellectual property! But as long as the reviewer is anonymous, the author should be free to share that review with anybody he wants to. As an editor, I would certainly not encourage that–you never know who may end up reading what–but I do not see how I could prevent it either, and I would not regard it as unethical in any case.
In this particular case, it is trickier because Ryan also exposed Steig as the reviewer, breaching both his anonymity and his confidence. I wish he hadn’t done it–mind games like the ones Mosher suggested might have been better and even more fun, perhaps–but as I said before, he was responding to a pretty strong provocation.
As clarity was requested, clarity will be provided. I did not explicitly tell Eric that I would keep the information about him being a reviewer confidential. However, he did request that I do so, and I fully intended to do so. Additionally, I explicitly told him that I would keep the reviews confidential (which are now online), and I meant that to include his identity as a reviewer.
The reason for the careful phrasing is that someone could claim after having examined the emails that I made no such promise to keep his identity secret. However (from the horse’s mouth), the lack of explicitly agreeing to Eric’s request was simply an oversight. My email left him with the correct impression that I had agreed not to disclose the information he provided.
Whether his subsequent actions justify my disclosure of the information is, of course, a question that different people are likely to answer differently. I feel I was justified. Phil obviously does not.
Julio:
Interesting to think about: When you have reviews that substantially improve the paper… I can even think of one case where one of the referees ended up joining forces with us and coauthoring the paper (he had data that we combined with our theoretical paper.)
Must have been interesting to be the editor… (??? I just found a third reviewer for this paper, and now THIS.)
Ryan thanks for the update. This does sound pretty close to what I pictured it to be: A gentlemen’s agreement and nothing further.
Phil is making a big stink of this one point because it’s all he has. (See the Eric Cartman South Park episode I linked earlier if you want to know what image that conveys to my mind.)
Kenneth–
There are two distinct issues:
1) Who is correct on the science.
2) Whether or how the peer review process is being perverted.
Ryan discussed both and I think both matter.
Ryan is writing quite a bit on the technical material, and I wouldn’t be surprised that if Eric publishes another paper, Ryan will as well. I am not going to try to dive in to discuss these details.
Since everything goes through peer review process, I think there also need to be a discussion of (2) and I am doing that. I don’t think this is inappropriate nor to I think discussing this takes away from RyanO discussing the technical material or co-authors joining.
In my opinion, RyanO did absolutely nothing wrong. My question is whether we are absolutely, positively sure Steig is Reviewer A. But whether we are sure or not, I think sunshine is the best disinfectant, and I think discussion of the issue is appropriate. in that context, I prefer RyanO to have aired it than the contrary.
If Steig wished he could make the entire discussion about his role in the peer review process end by revealing whether or not he is Reviewer A rather than writing strange cryptic comments like “sigh” in comments at RC. Steig doesn’t wish to do this. I don’t understand that.
Re: GrantB,
Well, I can understand their not responding. But is their any rule that says they only let scientific comments through? These both got through:
Followed by
But maybe that’s “science”. 🙂
Obviously, they can let whatever they wish through. And we get to notice what is let through.
Ryan O (Comment#68579),
.
Thanks for that clarification.
.
The only conundrum would be if Eric was reviewer B, C, or D, and some other person (i.e. team player) was in fact reviewer A.
.
I am imagining maybe the ‘good-cop-bad-cop’ ploy, with Micheal Mann as the bad cop; oh well, you get the idea.
Yes. If Eric turns out to be one of the other reviewers, people should be demanding the same level of explanation and contrition out of me that they are currently demanding out of Eric.
I’ve read that suggestion elsewhere, but I don’t think they’re that subtle.
Ryan O,
“If Eric turns out to be one of the other reviewers, people should be demanding the same level of explanation and contrition out of me that they are currently demanding out of Eric.”
.
And that admission, my friend, is why I am sure you will do the right thing. I can’t say the same of the RC crew. You have no agenda. They obviously do.
Ryan O,
You (obviously) don’t have to reply to this, but I’m wondering if you still feel this way as you wrote at the time of the paper’s publication: “I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement.” I found that a little puzzling at the time, as Steve McIntyre characterized it as a “refutation.” Not that co-authors can’t disagree of course, but I’m wondering whether subsequent events have changed your view at all.
There are not gonna be any responses to any questions. I think Eric’s (and RC’s) tactic is clear by now – sit quietly in the bunker and wait for the storm to pass.
I don’t get it. Is Antarctica warming or not?
Neven (Comment#68594)
February 9th, 2011 at 5:09 am
I don’t get it. Is Antarctica warming or not
NOT !!!
Haha, I’m quite liking their borehole. I’ve now had an RC comment against my post withdrawn.
120TimTheToolMan says:
5 Feb 2011 at 11:37 PM
“Hank writes : “Or you could say “the pre-satellite data taken at Byrd Station was confirmed when the satellite data extended its measurements adding a large area.â€â€
Why do you conclude that measurements taken afterwards confirm measurements taken before?
The trend from 1970 onwards is a cooling trend. It’s only a warming trend when the pre-satellite data is included. So one dataset hardly “confirms†the other!”
…originally had a comment by Eric that I should check my facts. Drat, shoulda taken a screenshot but his reply was short and sweet and my insolence was apparently enough to send my post packing.
In the light of Ryan O’s fact finding mission on their method showing that when warming is introduced at Byrd their method shows virtually no warming overall seems to have hit a nerve 🙂
Last post on RC:
#88
[Response: Perhaps you should try thinking, instead of asking me what to think. Let me turn this question around on you: why do you take O’Donnell at his word? And now he’s my word: His allegations have no basis in fact. Now you have my word against his. Now try thinking,-eric]
So, that means that Eric was NOT the now-legendary “Reviewer Aâ€!
That’s great to hear… why oh why did it take so long for you to say so?
So O’Donnell, Mcintyre and that lot are just making things up again… typical!
Don’t just make it known here… make sure this becomes established as hard fact by actually getting it out there!
You’ve caught them at it red-handed… make hay while the sun shines.
Comment by mct — 9 Feb 2011 @ 4:08 AM
With his comment did Eric say that he’s not reviewer A? I don’t think so…
But what is interesting though, is that the gate keepers let this comment pass in this otherwise pretty much closed thread (with some minor weird exceptions of Hank Roberts and doghaza). It means – let others create an image of what might be true or might not without anybody being able to point a finger on what Eric himself confirmed or not.
And have you noticed that almost all the moderators with their comments have disappeared (raypierre on another thread was the last one seen)? Emergency cession going on? I think not, I still think they have decided to disappear for a while and quietly wait till “it’s over”
stephen richards (Comment#68595) February 9th, 2011 at 5:21 am
It is. ODonnel find more warming on the peninsula, but less warming on the mainland, but overall warming.
Wow! The comment I was referring to made it past the gate keepers, but has now been removed (not even into the bore hole)!
Sven
Why? This reads weasely? Which allegations have no basis in fact? Is eric claiming the email is fake? That eric didn’t write that email? That eric isn’t a reviewer at all? Or that some of the motives some people are alleging have no basis in fact?
Clearly, the allegation that eric is reviewer A has some basis in fact. The question is: Is he or is he not reviewer A? This question can be answered directly and clearly with “yes” or “no”. Eric isn’t doing that!
I guess, it being night in the States, some junior moderator, because of the praise to Eric and bad mouthing of O’Donnell and McIntyre, deemed the comment worthy. But on second thought (or when someone more senior woke up?) they discovered how damaging it was. This was the first time that the words “Reviewer A” passed to the commentary of RC! So far, people reading just RC have no clue, what it’s all about. And Hank Roberts and dhogaza are trying to make sure nobody ever will…
Lucia writes : ” The question is: Is he or is he not reviewer A? This question can be answered directly and clearly with “yes†or “noâ€. Eric isn’t doing that!”
With all the editing and obvious attempts to keep on message, “eric’s” reply makes no sense to me. He claims the poster is telling him what to think but I cant see that. He has a typo with “he’s” -> “here’s” (I assume) and finishes off with a non sensical plea for “thinking” …along with a redundant comma.
Perhaps its a post from a man under immense stress and pressure. And now it cant be edited because its key.
Of course, now he can claim that the others are just stupid and evil, and becauseof a lack of skills making ad hominem attacks not worthy of a reply etc., but I guess what his main concern is (and rightly so), is that it’s a kind of an issue that will probably not stay in the blogosphere, but will get out to general public. Including his fellow scientists. And that’s where he’ll have some explaining to do.
Sorry, to make it clear, in my post #68597 about RC’s comment #88 only the first and last lines (“Last post on RC:” and “With his comment did Eric say that he’s not reviewer A? I don’t think so…”) are mine, all the rest is from mct’s now deleted comment at RC…
So Antarctica is still warming (especially the Peninsula). Check.
.
With all the righteous indignated shouting going on I thought the AGW theory was finally killed off. Unfortunately this isn’t so. It’s about the purported behaviour of the Team again.
.
As it is very difficult for me to judge (lacking knowledge about and experience with statistics and the peer review process), I’ll just leave you to your micro-carnage.
.
Just this minor nit:
.
.
Or could it be wishful thinking? 🙂
Sven–
If you can, take screen shots of comments you think worth reporting. It’s trivial with my mac– how about with the pc?
Not too hard with pc either. Sorry, did not think about it at the moment… 🙁
“With all the righteous indignated shouting going on I thought the AGW theory was finally killed off. Unfortunately this isn’t so. It’s about the purported behaviour of the Team again.”
No so. Quite apart from the fact the O’Donnell paper halved the warming, O’Donnell’s paper has been shown to be more robust than Steig’s and hinges very much on the data at Byrd to show the warming. Should a correction to the Byrd data happen for a cold bias, then the warming trend for Antarctica could vanish very easily.
Of course the opposite is true too in that a correction for a warm bias at Byrd would increase the overall warming but then AGW theory still has to explain why the warming suddenly happened decades ago and hasn’t happened since despite the increasing CO2.
Coment Sven discussed earliest–
Ok. I’m thinking. These are my thoughts:
RyanO stated things very clearly and directly in ways that would be extremely difficult to understand. He provided an email which reveals eric’s exact words. In that email, eric says he was “a reviewer” very clearly. Other things are unclear– owing to eric’s form of communication. Specifically, it appears he is saying he is reviewer A, but parsing words we cannot be absolutely, positively sure he is saying that.
When asked a series of questions, eric gave rather ambiguous answer. He doesn’t specifically address the questions in an unambiguous way, but referred to “his allegations”. He doesn’t even say “these allegations”, which would refer back to the questions.
The answer seems to suggests that he is saying
a) he was not a reviewer– but says so indirectly. The evidence strongly suggests he was. So, if I were on a jury, I would be inclined to take this as possible evidence eric is untruth, disingenuous or prevarication.
b) he doesn’t address question (2) at all.
c) presumably, he is avoiding engaging question (3) directly.
So, reading what Eric said and then thinking inclines me to believe eric is likely trying to tap dance around the truth while giving a false impression. I have no idea what eric imagines people who read his answer will think but I suspect many will think what I think.
Submitted to the RealClimate.org moderation queue at 9:02am EST, after comment #88 by Kevin McKinney.
Neven – To you and Bugs directly.
Ryan’s paper has nothing to do with whether Antarctica is warming or not. Period. Please get this through thick skulls, since it’s been said over and over again. The whole paper was just about Eric getting his math wrong. Using two few PC’s to be exact (3) – with the effect being that warming from the peninsula was being smeared throughout the whole of Antarctica. It was just a sensitivity test. If you want to run the numbers again using more PC’s (say 7 which seems to be the right number) then you have another large problem – The warming trend you get is smaller than the error bars. Oops
All of this personally is silly because the methods of combining different measurement techniques is nonsense (have no basis in statistics or physics that I am able to find). We just don’t have enough data to get the kind of precision that people like Steig would like you to believe.
The best we can tell from actual data is this. We don’t know what is going on down there temp wise other than to say whatever it is, it isn’t much outside of the peninsula (which I also have doubts about). It certainly isn’t warming as we were told it should be given what we were told initially about AGW .
Who reviewed Stieg 09?
Amac–
Your accepting that as saying he is not reviewer A? You can move on to whatever you like, but I still want to know if he is saying he is reviewer A.
Re: Sven (Feb 9 05:30),
This morning at 6:45am EST, I also read the then-current comment 88 to the RealClimate post “West Antarctica: still warming.”
The remarks in brackets are mct’s direct quote of Eric Steig’s inline response to “BPW”. (At this writing, BPW’s comment is still up at position 83.)
When I looked again at 8:45am, mct’s comment had been deleted, replaced at position #88 by Kevin McKinney’s comment of 7:43am.
Tim, you left an apostophe out of can’t, from which I infer that your leg is broken.
“Tim, you left an apostophe out of can’t, from which I infer that your leg is broken.”
Haha, I’m rarely perfect with my own posts, but for such an important post, “eric’s” sure was a poorly made comment. Not even proof read it seems.
AMac–
Ok. Now I understand. You took the moderator permitting a comment to escape moderation interpreting eric’s comment as communicating “So, that means that Eric was NOT the now-legendary “Reviewer Aâ€! to mean that someone at RC confirmed that’s what Eric means.
But then… it was deleted….
Following Eric’s advice and thinking what does this make one think?
I wish eric would just answer the dang question. It’s true he is not required to do so. But either he was the reviewer or he wasn’t. It appears he was, and the way he behaves gives an even stronger impression– but also makes him seem like a weasel.
Maybe he likes seeming like a weasel?
There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde
I’m torn between the two…
In an email yesterday to Ryan and Jeff Id, Steig stated:
In his RC comment, Steig stated:
Yup.
The following comment by eric is also an interesting one
Its at 67
“[Response: It would be entirely normal for an editor to send a paper criticizing someone’s work to that person, for their opinion. You just wouldn’t want that opinion to be the deciding factor, which is why normally you’d get several other reviewers; this is presumably the case here. Reviews, however, are usually confidential and anonymous. As for our ‘treatment’ of Jeff Condon, he hasn’t written anything here lately so I really don’t have any idea what he is talking about.–eric]”
What is presumably the case here? That the paper was sent to the person who’s paper was being criticized? ie Eric?
Re: Steve McIntyre (Comment#68626)
So what he’s trying to say with “His allegations have no basis in fact” is just that he never actually asked Ryan to use the method he is now criticizing. He either misremembered his reviews, or thinks they were misinterpreted, or are now being misconstrued, or all of the above. That’s the crux of the problem, I think.
I mentioned the problems with k_gnd in my first, second, and 3rd reviews. You never addressed these in a satisfactory manner (at least, not convincing to me).
Do you know how k_gnd relates to iridge vs TTLS?
Neven,
Looks like nobody wants to reply to your comments. Do you know why?
.
Well, because your comments are irrelevant. Yes, on average, Antarctica (but mostly the peninsula and nearby areas) has warmed since 1957. The warming in the peninsula most certainly is statistically significant, as is the warming in the region adjacent to the peninsula. Any warming since 1957 over the rest of the continent appears to be statistically insignificant. Nobody here appears to be saying otherwise. Here are the issues at hand:
1) Seig (09) had substantial errors in methodology, which caused grossly (eg ~100%) overstated average warming for the entire continent, along with a gross understatement of the warming in the peninsula region. This publication is one of many in the long line of “It’s much worse than we thought” articles published in climate science over the last 10-15 years.
.
2) The errors in Steig (09) were obvious enough that several people (including the authors of O’Donnell et al, but also others) recognized immediately the the Steig (09) paper had serious methodology problems, the most important of which was the use of too few principle components in their reconstruction.
.
3) When these problems were pointed out to Eric Steig, his reaction was arrogant, condescending, and hostile. (If you doubt this, then please read the RC posting “On Overfitting” and especially Erics’s comments that followed.) He basically said (paraphrasing): You are wrong. Publish a refutation or shut up.
.
4) So O’Donnell et al did just that.
.
5) Eric Steig appears certainly to have been a reviewer of O’Donnell et al. If Steig was “Reviewer A” then it at least appears Steig acted in bad faith during the review process, by trying to force changes to weaken the paper, at least one of which he later criticized, and by forcing long delays in the review process. Nobody except the journal editor, Steig, and (perhaps) another other person who was in fact “reviewer A”, knows for certain if Steig was “Reviewer A”. And none of them are talking.
.
What really matters here Neven is: a) Steig (09) was substantially incorrect in its methodology and calculated average warming, b) Eric Steig at least appears to have acted in bad faith, and c) there appears to be a disturbing pattern (see the UEA email messages) where a smallish group of well known climate scientists uses the peer review process to try to control what can be published. All the while pointing to a lack of published work that is skeptical of their “consensus” view as confirmation that skeptical views are wholly without scientific merit.
.
It looks like you are unable to see any problems with the actions of this group of well known climate scientists; I wonder if you understand how odd this inability to see obvious problems is. You seem to believe none of this matters, and we must accept the ‘consensus view’ as irrefutable fact. I think you are mistaken, and I suspect lots of other people think so too. Perhaps that is why nobody wants to reply to your comments.
SteveF – Thanks for calling me nobody. I did address this already.
One, two, three.
Get outa my tree.
=============
Steve McIntyre,
“I mentioned the problems with k_gnd in my first, second, and 3rd reviews. You never addressed these in a satisfactory manner (at least, not convincing to me).”
.
Wow! Then there is no longer any possibility of doubt. Steig was in fact Reviewer A, and Steig is in fact a “super weasel”. Steig really is lucky that I am not his provost.
AJ Abrams (Comment#68633) February 9th, 2011 at 9:31 am
“SteveF – Thanks for calling me nobody. I did address this already.”
.
No offense intended. You posted between the time I started writing and when I posted.
SteveF – Was my sad attempt at dry humor. No offense was taken.
“1) Who is correct on the science.
2) Whether or how the peer review process is being perverted.
Ryan discussed both and I think both matter.”
Lucia, I also would like to hear Steig tell the world which reviewer he was. It is rather obvious that he was a reviewer (in the email to Ryan and Jeff) and since he notes his reviews were in the unique number provided by Reviewer 3 he must be that reviewer.
My point is that the weaknesses of Steig’s science in defense of S(09) and in criticizing O(10) is more important to the ongoing debate on climate science and as an example of the weaknesses of the science as practiced by some members of that community.
Do you, Lucia, judge that if Steig is revealed as the third reviewer that it will have any impact on changing the peer review system to avoid future problems like this one or that the Steig defenders and criticizers will have a change of mind based on his reviewer status?
Based on the evidence, as I see it, I would have to say that Steig’s personality and state of mind are worrisome and I keep looking for an explanation that would be more in line with the expected reactions from a scientist or even an advocate/scientist in his situation. I do not pretend to be able to psycho analyze, but my only thought on his reactions are that he sees himself on a very important mission whereby he can be excused for cutting some corners here and there, or, at the least, he feels he does not, therefore, have to deal with ethical lapses.
I should be saying Reviewer A and not the third reviewer. The only excuse I have is that maybe I was thinking the reviewer that made three reviews – or maybe I was not thinking at all.
Eric might simply be saying that although he criticised his own suggested method at Realclimate(if it was he who suggested them), he did so, in good faith.
.
I think Eric deserves the benefit of the doubt. It is he (along with the staff at J Clim) who knows the who knows the whole story (come on Eric, make us look like fools!!).
.
Not so easy to reconcile his public comments at Air Vent and Dot Earth though.
julio
Maybe so. But steig, knowing he was Reviewer A and knowing he had written numerous reviews, some including words like ‘My recommendation is that the editor insist that results showing the ‘mostly [sic] likely’ West Antarctic trends be shown in place of Figure 3’ and “the use of the ‘iridge’ procedure makes sense to me, and I suspect it really does give the best results.”, and finally knowing the manuscript was changed might have thought to email RyanO to ask why the method was changed.
Instead, Eric — who knew the method had changed wrote a critical post at the highly visible RC– visible enough to be noted by Andy Revkin at dotEarth.
What… a…. weasel!!!! Complete totally weasel..!!
Steve M #68626
This shows then that Steig was indeed “Reviewer A”.
Sooner or later Andy Revkin is going to catch on. It’s not like he hasn’t been clued in. By me. Ooh, maybe that’s the problem.
=====================
LC and Lucia
If suspect A says – You never addressed my concerns over evidence X, and reviewer A was the only reviewer to express concerns over evidence X, then Suspect A is, in fact, Reviewer A : Case closed in any court of law. He said “I” expressed concerns in review A, B, &C. Over with, can we now move on to two points?
1. The fact that suspect A is a weasel
2. The science, which seems to be open and shut given the last post on CA.
I suspect the team would like to visit 2, so they can yet again try to play hide the pea. They will try to say that Ryan’s conclusions are about saying something they are not…oh wait, they are already doing that.
kim–
Has Andy written his post on this yet? My impression is he only noted that a story was unfolding by adding an update to a previous blog post.
I was speaking more generally, lucia. In 2008, the angry on the ‘other side’ called his blog dotkim.
============================
Lucia,
Just yesterday, I was trying to understand your cool reaction. Today you are all – “weasel!!” etc. What just happened? I seem to have missed an email between the two contesting authors. Could you please provide some context?
.
(I usually don’t ask lazy questions, so please excuse)
Shub– Not giving context. I will only say that I now know Steig is a weasel.
Eric is back commenting posts at RC. Promised to write a post on the issue some time today
#68632
Steve F, an excellent summary. Maybe it’s time to quote Wegman and in particular his analysis in respect of the ‘mutual admiration society’
http://climateaudit.org/2006/07/14/wsj-house-energy-report-on-the-mutual-admiration-society/
‘Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. “As analyzed in our social network,” Mr. Wegman writes, “there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.” He continues: “However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”‘
Well, this is interesting. My submission to the “West Antarctica still warming” thread at RealClimate has been accepted with a 2-plus hour delay… after a fashion. It retains its 9:02am timestamp.
The comment as submitted is upthread (Comment #68613).
RealClimate’s readers have no way of knowing that their moderator has removed the first paragraph of my remarks. I’ve replaced that text here, with strikethroughs. (Also, the word “Peninsula” was crossed out by the moderator to correct my typo — Russkaya and Byrd are in the West Antarctic, not on the Peninsula.)
I object to this stealthy trimming of my words to suit Dr. Steig’s tastes. Such tactics make honest, informed discussion nearly impossible.
Sven,
“Eric is back commenting posts at RC. Promised to write a post on the issue some time today”
.
I hope for a measure of contrition, honesty, and a lack of blatant hostility in that post…. but experience suggests my hopes may not be realistic.
Submitted to the queue at 11:59am EST.
AMac,
“It is hard to follow their line of argument amidst all the allegations and other crap though.–eric”
.
Maybe you could suggest he go to Bishop Hill’s blog; the explanation there is very clear. I am sure Eric can understand it.
Very curious to see how Eric ‘explains’ that he is not a ‘duplicitious idiot’, given his comments at the Air Vent and Dot Earth.
Steve – Since I see you are here can I ask you to please see my question on CA near the bottom of comments of coffin meet nail? It’s a technical question and on topic here and there. Thanks in advance.
Re: AMac (Feb 9 11:02),
My submission of 11:59am has now been expunged from the RealClimate moderation queue.
The clock is ticking, the suspense is almost unbearable:
Will he come clean? Will he not come clean?
Nobody knows.
(Actually: We all do).
And we note that Lucia dislikes bad behaviour more than bad science.
And in this case 2 minus do not make a plus.
Alexej Buergin,
.
Bad behavior in the defense of bad science is (I think) the real issue here.
Amac sent this:
I’m under the impression that trimming emails can be a legal “no-no”. Lawyers would have better terminology about this.
> I’m under the impression that trimming emails can be a legal “no-noâ€.
Just to be clear, I have no interest in any legal action. That route would make an already-dysfunctional situation yet worse, I think.
My preference would be for the RealClimate principals to look at the way they conduct their blogging activities — secret snipping, in this instance — and then take a deep breath.
Surely they could treat their readership with greater respect than is presently the case.
If they can’t or won’t — it may be time for members of the broader pro-AGW Consensus scientific establishment to wonder, Do we really want these particular fellows to be the most-prominent representatives of Climate Science to the scientifically-engaged public?
“…accepted with a 2-plus hour delay… after a fashion. It retains its 9:02am timestamp.”
That is standard RC practice for non-cheerleading comments.
Amac:
I think this is a good summary of the science.
I’d love to see the TLS method compared against Ryan’s iridge-based method. Ryan can you still do that?
lucia,
I believe these edits are a ‘no-no’ only in the sense that they increase the editor’s exposure to claims of acting in bad faith, etc.
I’m no lawyer either, but it’s my understanding that there exists a legal defense for internet service providers to claim, when facing a lawsuit, that they only provided the forum and not the content. This is why your ISP and web sites like Facebook are mostly immune to legal claims when someone is offended by a comment posted on a forum.
When the web site operator makes it a practice to edit the content of the postings, then they can no longer claim to be only a service provider not a content manager.
Sorry for the sideroad, but I find the intersection between the legal and virtual worlds to be fascinating.
Re: SteveF (Comment#68657)I hope for a measure of contrition, honesty, and a lack of blatant hostility in that post…. but experience suggests my hopes may not be realistic.
I predict a production not unlike a Super Bowl halftime show. The Team will descend from the sky and begin to dance a jargon-laden jig before a cheering throng of fawning fans all dressed as glow sticks. The contortionist choreography will spell the words “It Does Not Matter”. With that the extravaganza will end and Team will move on, declaring the show an error-free triumph.
At this point, if Eric wishes to write a new post, it should be a joint post with Ryan. That would clearly be the most efficient way at resolving the issues.
To do differently makes for good entertainment, but it is far from being the best way forward.
-Chip
AMac & Carrick-
I’m a little uncertain about the first portion listed there:
“Yesterday, O’Donnell presented a set of images that suggest that the main algorithm used in Steig et al (2009) yields a picture of Antarctic temperatures that is sensitive to the addition of a synthetic +0.2 C or -0.2 C trend to the weather stations on the Peninsula. This is an intuitive finding.”
Isn’t one of the major critiques of Steig et al (2009) that it is bleeding Peninsula warming into other areas of Anatarctica? I suppose that it depends on what is meant by “intuitive”, but to me those first set of pictures are also important in that they demonstrate this bleeding effect, and not quite intuitive in the “what-I-would-expect-with-a-perfect-methodology” sense.
Chip:
I totally concur – a joint response is really the best way forward.
So, Ryan does a joint post with someone, whose scientific conduct he has serious objections about.
.
Sounds like a good idea.
Re: Troy_CA (Feb 9 12:48),
> but to me those first set of pictures are also important in that they demonstrate this bleeding effect, and not quite intuitive…
I agree; that’s a nuance I left out. When writing for a Pravda-like house organ, it’s hard to know how much detail will be tolerated in a submission. (And in the event, I was only half-successful.)
Still, “weather station temperatures rising, map shows rising temperatures in that region” is the expected finding, at the most-basic level.
“Weather station temperatures rising, map shows temperatures stay the same” is unexpected.
Shub,
Yes. I am sure that Eric is not happy with Ryan either.
That’s what kissing and making up is all about!
Once that is done (as unappealing as it may initially seem to each), then the math/science issues can be resolved much more quickly and much closer to everyone’s mutual consent.
And we’ll all be the better for it.
-Chip
Re: SteveF (Feb 9 09:28),
“Steig acted in bad faith during the review process, by trying to force changes to weaken the paper, at least one of which he later criticized, and by forcing long delays in the review process.”
Well, co-author NicL doesn’t think iridge weakened the paper:
“In my experience, using Truncated Total Least Squares to infill missing data (as Steig did for the S09 reconstruction) compounds these sorts of problem. Ridge regression, which we used, seems generally to be a more stable method.”
Which is pretty much what reviewer A said.
And Steig now thinks that iridge lowered the trend estimate, which is a different problem. Maybe it does. But that seems to be his remaining criticism. I don’t see any other changes he proposed that are supposed to have weakened the paper. Do you?
Chip,
To be sure, there are more than math/science issues involved here.
.
The math/science issues can be addressed later and will be addressed later. Indeed, in view of the infinitesimal temperature changes involved, I am not even sure they are important at all.
Chip,
“At this point, if Eric wishes to write a new post, it should be a joint post with Ryan. That would clearly be the most efficient way at resolving the issues.”
.
And would unedited comments then be allowed? At RC? Would Eric ever post anywhere else?
.
Nice thought, but ‘taint gonna happen. I suspect they are far too ticked off at each other right now to consider this option in any case. Besides, ‘kissing and making up’ usually involves at least some admission of error for both parties. Has ANYONE at RC ever admitted the tiniest of errors? I don’t think they ever have.
It looks like the interesting discussions are going on behind the scenes (so to speak) between Eric and Ryan O (via email I presume).
Zeke Hausfather says:
8 Feb 2011 at 7:08 PM
Eric,
O’Donnell and his coauthors argue that the choice of iridge (instead of TTLS) was in response to comments from a reviewer of the paper. This, at least, seems to be a somewhat weak point upon which to critique their approach if their originally submitted work relied solely on TTLS.
[Response: How can I put this succinctly? How about this; I have pointed out the facts of the matter to O’Donnell et al. They have not changed what they have written. They are therefore now lying to their readers. It’s actually about that simple. –eric]
FWIW, I am the BPW who managed to get those comments through. My first was moderated away which is why I asked at the beginning of my second why that was the case. I was surprised he answered and let my second, and third, through. And, for the record, he did not change or otherwise edit my questions. Though he didn’t really answer any of them either.
Also, I am not being disingenuous when I say I have not passed judgment. I simply find the whole thing fascinating which is why I lurk in these blogs to begin with. And I like to hear both sides of a story before forming an opinion. With that said, Eric’s non-answers to my questions don’t necessarily boost my belief that the allegations are false.
“[Response: How can I put this succinctly? How about this; I have pointed out the facts of the matter to O’Donnell et al. They have not changed what they have written. They are therefore now lying to their readers. It’s actually about that simple. –eric]”
I’ve read the entire reviewer A comments and each comment back by Ryan et al. What Eric is saying is completely false. They changed from TTLS to ridge regression based on Eric’s initial comments. I am not sure if Eric intended them to do so or not, but the change did address his review. They then added said TTLS version to the supplemental section as supporting evidence only. Eric then still attacked said TTLS portion and demanded they change it…even though their results were no longer based on it. It is true that they didn’t change the TTLS version, as he requested but to bring up that is so disingenuous as to be appalling given that it’s now just a supplemental to their findings. In brief – it’s a straw man of epic proportions
Nick Stokes,
“Well, co-author NicL doesn’t think iridge weakened the paper”
.
Perhaps it is better to defer to the opinion of another of the co-authors:
Steve McIntyre (Comment#68442) February 8th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
J Climate only rejected Steig’s Third Review objections. Editor Broccoli required “major revisions†and re-review in respect to Steig’s First Review and Second Review. These revisions included changes that, in my opinion, did not enhance the paper – in fact, the opposite.
That seems pretty clear. Perhaps you could ask Steve McIntyre, here or at ClimateAudit, what those changes were.
I did read Seig’s three reviews; my personal impression is that he was working at each stage to cast doubt on O’Donnell et al’s results by making them focus on issues that were largely unrelated to the thrust of paper, which was quite simple: Steig(09) used erroneous methodology that gave incorrect results, regardless of the consequent climatology issues.
Zeke,
I think you are right, there are interesting discussions going on behind the scenes between Eric and Ryan. Look at Climate Audit, they’ve changed some language of Ryan’s article. Including the name…
The main changes seem to be the removal of words like duplicity and dishonesty aso.
Yes, CA specialises in weasel words and dog whistles. Achieve exactly the same meaning, but provide plausible deniability.
At CA it now says.
Bugs,
.
Lots of publications in climate science are loaded with ‘weasel words’. CA has a lot to learn from climate science in this area.
I wonder why Eric Steig made his post at RC. S(09) is still in play, O(10) raised guestions that IMO were not fatal to S(09). There must be something else in play, if he had real issues with O(10) a rebuttal paper would seem to be more appropriate -a post at RC does not rebut O(10).
There will be more information to follow, but I need to take a break from this for a while. In the meantime:
.
Carrick: Yes, I will provide the same sensitivity tests for our method as S09 when I have time (next day or two) and put them together in that same post.
.
iRidge: There are some times where TTLS would be preferable to iRidge. This is not one of those times. We were planning to submit a second paper after this one, redoing the analysis with ridge regression, to demonstrate in cases where the eigenvalues of the data are smoothly decaying and the SNR is reasonably high (as is definitely the case with the station data) that ridge is superior to TTLS, and that this result is general. However, we decided to take Steig’s recommendation in the interest of even having a first paper.
Re: R.Connelly,
No idea. He may have a paper in the review process and thinks it will be published soon? Who knows?
What I don’t understand is why, Eric knowing he is reviewer A, knowing the method he now criticizes was given less prominence in the early versions,, knowing he criticized some methods in the earlier versions and that fair reading of his criticism seems to strongly endorse the method he now criticizes, why,
a) Eric doesn’t preface his post by admitting he is reviewer A.
b) Mentioning that when acting as a reviewer, he said things that might be read to endorse this method– out of all the many methods discussed in the paper as a whole and
c) Even if he didn’t think he forced RyanO to feature this method prominently and might have been surprised to see it trickle to the top of the pile in thediscussion, he didn’t email RyanO and ask something like this: “I know in the first drafts, method X was not highlighted prominently. Why did that change?” Then RyanO would have said: I read your domment to indicate you insisted this method be the one featured.
I’ve read the reviewer A reviews. Individually, paragraphs can seem clear. But over all — especially over time, they seem amount to stream of consciousness musings that make would lead authors to seem the reviewer is insisting on “X”, when later the reviewer can claim that was never what they insisted on. It reads like a big game of whackamole played under the cover of anonymity.
SteveF (Comment#68683) February 9th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
I don’t know that they are allowed anywhere. CA appears to have a strict moderation policy, as does WUWT. So does this blog. The rules vary, but they all have them.
Here is one, by Gavin.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/why-does-the-stratosphere-cool-when-the-troposphere-warms/
bugs–
I wouldn’t call my moderation policy “strict”.
lucia (Comment#68698) February 9th, 2011 at 2:39 pm
The rules vary from site to site, like I said, but you put your foot down on the “D” word. WUWT and CA are far more restrictive in their scope.
bugs–
Yes. It starts food fights. Oddly, I don’s use spam karma anymore, so I think that word will just fly through now. (Not sure.)
There are other words in the filter. I can’t even use them!
BPW,
If you are reading this,
I know you have no side to take, but you must remember,
the strategy at Realclimate is to pick on a fresh newcomer, and taunt/troll.
Chip wrote “At this point, if Eric wishes to write a new post, it should be a joint post with Ryan. That would clearly be the most efficient way at resolving the issues.” I disagree: I wouldn’t expect it to be efficient at all.
Why is this a mutual kissing and making up situation? The authors of O10 put a large amount of work into jumping through hoops that the Mann-associated authors have demanded in the past. In particular, they pushed their criticism through the sausage machine at a reasonably established peer-reviewed journal. It seems to me that there’s a pretty strong case that when they did so, they were treated unreasonably by Steig in particular. Steig’s followup demand that the technical controversy be discussed under RC moderation also seems absurdly unreasonable. Making a considerable effort to satisfy one’s opponents demands, and still being treated unreasonably … it seems to me that this is a situation where if any kissing and making up happens, it should be started by (at least someone on) the Team acknowledging the unreasonableness and committing to avoid it in the future.
Until/unless something changes on the Team side, this seems to me an appropriate situation for Team critics simply to be openly critical. One can go “all — ‘weasel!!’ etc.” in the manner of fed-up Lucia Lindegren or Thomas Macaulay. One can drip acid in the manner of fed-up Steve McIntyre or David Hume. One can grouchily snipe from the sidelines in anticipation of being buried under “ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” like Jonathan Swift. Or, if one has the patience of Adam Smith or Charles Darwin or Judy Curry, one can patiently continue to lay out one’s case and generally avoid any expression of exasperation or triumphalism harsher than “Well, that is more of a reconciliation than any of us could have hoped for, for all of us to agree that the science is not settled.”
In most factual disagreements it’s important not to start by coming out swinging, blindly assuming one’s opponents will act in good faith. But having done that, it seldom works very well to simply not notice when one’s opponents do act in bad faith. Even if one doesn’t actively respond to it or even necessarily acknowledge the problem publicly, it tends to be important to use various techniques to arrange one’s case so that it can in effect roll right over bad faith criticism, because bad faith attacks on it tend to discredit the attacker. IMO the development of those techniques is a key reason that science has been so explosively successful for several centuries despite human nature remaining plenty ornery. And conversely, the nonobviousness of those techniques (and lack of communication technology to make them economical) helps explain why science progressed so slowly before that.
It could be very useful if we had similar techniques for conflicts about personality, politics, policy, status, and privilege, allowing one to offer to kiss and make up in such a way that a bad faith response on one’s opponent’s part would reliably discredit one’s opponent. Alas, I think the relatively slow progress in politics over the past few centuries (compared to progress in science over the same period) is suggestive evidence that such wonderful techniques don’t exist. Until and unless they are developed, I think responding to bad faith with a redoubled effort to kiss and make up is seldom a good strategy.
bugs (Comment#68697),
“I don’t know that they are allowed anywhere. CA appears to have a strict moderation policy, as does WUWT. So does this blog. The rules vary, but they all have them.”
.
Are you joking? Ask Jeff Id how may comments he did not allow to post, deleted, or (worse) edited what the person wrote. IIRC, it was not more than 2 or 3 in a couple of years. Ask Lucia how many comments she has not allow to post, deleted, or edited what the person wrote. Or Judith Curry. Come on bugs, it is not moderation per se that is the issue, it is the use of moderation to remove comments that are contrary to the blog’s POV. RC does this constantly. Even the most relevant technical comments are routinely “disappeared” at RC. Very few blogs do that. And the ones that do (like RC, Tamino, Stoat, etc) are IMO not worth commenting on.
.
With regard to someone at RC admitting an error, I stand corrected. I hope Eric follows Gavin’s good example and admits Steig (09) has serious problems.
Gavin’s revision of his original post is an example of how it should be done.
Too bad his colleagues don’t always share his same high standards.
Jeff Id did some very strange editing at his own site, when something got the better of him.
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2011/01/21/the-idiots-got-to-him/
That exchange seems to have gone.
Ok. I’m amazed. Eric seems to be suggesting your 84 and 91 contained “Do you still beat your wife” questions. I’m not seeing that– the still element is important in that characterization. “Do you beat still beat your wife” questions aren’t just questions you don’t like. They are questions that sound like “yes/no” questions but either answer leaves the impression that, at least at one time, you beat your wife.
They are also easily dealt with when noticed. You answer: I never beat my wife– provided that is true. Or, I never beat anyone. Huh? Weird question. I’m not even married. Did you mean to ask someone else? All answers get you around this!
Let’s look:
This is clearly not a do you still beat your wife question. The answer is either yes or no.
Clearly, if the answer to 1 was no. This is moot, and so, one need not answr it. But if the answer is yes, the question doesn’t become a “do you still beat your wife” question. You could answer the question in the abstract if you wished. (For example: I think there is always some conflict when someone reviews a paper strongly critical of ones own- but it is still done. Measures need to be in place for editors to correctly deal with this.)
If the answer to (1) was he wasn’t a reviewer, he could just assume the “if so” in (2) should have been formatted to preceed (2) and applies to both (2) and (3). The answer would be: No. I didn’t review the paper.
Or, if he was the reviewer, he could answer this. Or he could say he will be answering it later. But it’s not a “do you still beat your wife” question.
Shub,
I know how things go over there. Not my first time dipping my toes in the water, just the first that actually seems to matter. Thanks for the note though. Dhogaza has already started with his usual tactics of suggesting that anyone with a question is somehow evil or has preconceptions.
I really don’t pass judgment until I hear both sides as the truth is so often found in the middle.
It’s an interesting story though to be sure.
Bugs,
.
The AirVent blog is no longer operating, and that particular exchange looks like it may have been the last straw for Jeff. I stand by my earlier comment: there is a substantive difference between using moderation to restrict offensive comments (as Lucia does a little, WUWT does more) and using moderation to simply delete comments that are on topic and not offensive, but that the blog owner doesn’t want posted simply because they disagree with the content. If you do not see a distinction, then there is not anything more I can add.
bugs–
I think that specific exchange is what it says it is–made up based on the WUWT persons recollection. The blog post still exists, and re-appeared soon after it did, indeed, vanish for technical reasons. This was discussed at collide a scape.
FWIW– I have learned of the technical difficulties in an email from Jeff when the occurred. The reason I learned in the email was Jeff wanted to post about Makarieva, but he was locked out of his blog and couldn’t get in for a while. He emailed several of me to ask if I would run the post on peer review of M’s paper as he had oferred to do that for her previously and was now in the embarrassing position of not being able to follow through. We discussed it a bit. (I was willing, but as I had been critical of that paper, I sort of thought M would prefer someone esle to do it. Jeff asked around. Anthony ran the post.)
Lucia,
For the record, none of those questions were ever intended to be anything more than what they are. Simple questions. I was being genuine, not trying to bait.
For (2), there may be real reasons why one would not see conflict of interest. If so, I am simply curious what those reasons would be. It may be that it is common practice. It just sounds odd to me.
I find (3) to be the most contentious because if the allegations of him suggesting a change only to use it to be critical are true, then a much deeper problem exists.
How the hell I became the one to get his questions through I will never know. I really mostly lurk and read as I find the whole topic/discussion fascinating.
bugs:
Are you advocating that he keep potentially offensive comments (regardless of who they are written by)? Or just being your usual hypocritical little self?
Bugs,
Here’s my experience today for two submissions to RealClimate. One short, civil, on-topic comment was stealth-modified. The other short, civil, on-topic comment failed moderation. Overall, then, my score is about 25%.
What’s your Moderation Score for short, civil, on-topic comments at this blog, for the past year? For all comments?
If it’s above 98% or so, I’d suggest that you don’t have a great deal to complain about. Comparatively speaking.
Lucia said “I’ve read the reviewer A reviews. Individually, paragraphs can seem clear. But over all — especially over time, they seem amount to stream of consciousness musings that make would lead authors to seem the reviewer is insisting on “Xâ€, when later the reviewer can claim that was never what they insisted on. It reads like a big game of whackamole played under the cover of anonymity.”
I actually agree and I am a skeptic. I don’t see where Eric insisted they use iRidge, however he did come down on them using TTLS and I can see where Ryan would think that forced him to go ridge, since it was the best way to address Eric’s concern. What Eric is going to argue is that he did not actually tell them to use ridge so his coming down on their using it now isn’t duplicitous. The part that is mind boggling is that both TTLS and ridge are used and he is happy with neither – It’s a game
How?
Well if he excepts the iridge as better as he initially indicated would be, he is wrong.
If he says TTLS is better, he is wrong given K_gnd=7
So what he is left doing, and saying is they should have used TTLS with a lower K_gnd (I think he wanted to use 4, but could be wrong there)
The whole he’s backed into is that TTLS stance is and was easily disproved. It should be fun trying to see him invent new math. Sensitivity testing really isn’t that difficult to wrap your head around and this seems pretty straight forward.
SteveF:
He obviously sees the distinction (offensive posts that do not further discussion should be targets of moderation), bug’s just not interested in intellectually honesty.
Neither is Keith Kloor, IMO.
steig’s post is up..
BPW–
Sure– and eric could answer. My view is that there is a conflict of interest, but the editor would be aware of it. So, it’s up to the editor to balance this. I think that’s the common view and there is much to be said for it.
I think (3) may have a very, very long answer. In all honestly, the anonymity of peer review, and communication through a third party (the editor) sometimes makes it very, very difficult to figure out the one true answer to that question.
What often happens:
You send in your paper communicating with the editor.
Weeks– sometimes months– later you get reviews which don’t necessarily all come to you at once.
One might be “The big long puzzling review”
The most perplexing are the ones that don’t come right out and insist on rejection, but discuss a huge list of what ifs, revisions etc. Some sound like ideas you must consider giving the impression that if these are changed, the paper will pass. Others sound like musings. Do you need to change those? What?
Can you just write a quick note asking for clarification? I think generally.. no… not really. You could in real life– but it’s difficult in the review process. So, typically, one revises the manuscript based on whatever changes seem to be required based on your reading of the reviews and which you judge do not change your main point. Maybe you think the changes make your paper better. Maybe you think they don’t. But compared to the alternative of your paper being in limbo for at least another 6 months…. well…
Your alternative is to refuse to make changes and persuade the reviewer you are right, or send letters to the editor etc. So, making changes you judge not to change the main point often seems the best course even if you think your first choice of presentation was better.
Your other alternative is to retract and send your article to another journal. But say you have 2 glowing reviews and “the big long stream of consciousness musings”? If you send your article to another journal, you still might get a review by this stream of consciousness person.
So, say this sort of thing happens: Did the authors make changes the reviewer insisted on? suggested? Maybe just threw out there as random musings if they so chose? Will the author and reviewers answers be the same?
I’m not sure there is an ‘one true’ answer to (3). I think it’s true that O’Donnell made changes based on their reading of Steig’s review — and I can see why they thought Steig was insisting on that change. Steig definitely criticized the stuff that was emphasized or elevated as a result of those changes.
Whether Steig thinks he insisted on those changes? Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he can even explain why he thinks he didn’t. If he says he doesn’t think he insisted– then I’d take his word for that. But, in which case, I’d say Steig should put his reviews aside and learn to write them so that it is utterly clear which changes he is insisting on, and which he thinks are just tweaks, suggestions or musings.
AJ Abrams,
“Sensitivity testing really isn’t that difficult to wrap your head around and this seems pretty straight forward.”
.
Ryan O’s graphic panels using added trends (both positive and negative) and the Steig (09) method with 3 PC is so clear that It is hard to see how Eric get’s out of this mess…. unless he just admits that Steig at al (09) was simply in error WRT the number of PC’s.
Lucia I suspect if you did a new analysis of AMSU trends now or soon enough the above incredible time, energy wasting, nitpickin discussion will fade to oblivion, especially next few years (ie Flat at 0C). As an aside, its a pity that someone like Eric with obvious talents cannot admit defeat (suspect young new scientist syndrome, with large head). Lucia, your time as a lukewarmer is probably coming to an end. LOL
VIP point about antarctica which no one seems to mention here are the underworld volcanoes at the peninsula (which is the only “warming area”) which has been extrapolated to cover the whole continent. Warmist keep your analysis to Arctic… more people like and fall for that one… hahahaha.
Stephan… I’m mystified by your comment. Truly mystified.
I’m going to get groceries and I’m going to sit on what I have to say over night. But I can say I read the Steighs RC comment, and I still think his comment at Jeff’s was mealy mouthed and misleading. I think Eric’s posting that was also just stupid. Uber stupid and disingenuous.
Eric can think that comment was not misleading and stupid– but there you go. I also continue to think that Eric exhibited one heck of a lot of bad behavior in this.
It’ll come down to this:
“A. Toward the end of the review, the reviewer suggests that the editor should require us to display the “most likely†reconstructions in the main text, which the reviewer correctly assumes would be the ridge regression results. We agree that this is the most appropriate choice, and the manuscript has been revised to show the ridge regression results in the main text. The TTLS/TSVD results have been relegated to the Supplemental Information.
”
So, Steig can argue that he didnt demand that the drop the TTLS in favor of ridge regression. Not explicitly.
Before they post something on the internet, everyone should do what I do: have two beers.
Snow day in Memphis!!!!!
Steven Mosher–
As I described to BPW — there is no one “correct” answer to (3).
Lucia thanks for your kind reply. I will always have the highest regard for you!, and your wonderful blog because of your ability to be tolerant and open minded as a real scientist should be! BTW I sincerely think that the continuing success of blog like this and CA, RC and WUWT are dependent on data analysis and not too much bickering, politic postings. I hope you will now do your cursory analysis of the temps trend including the latest which is back to a minus sign once again. Of course we will need some more negatives for some time before you lose your lukewarmer status (as you maintained you would do if true), just joking… LOL.
For once I totally agree with Boris hahahaha
I wonder, does Nature have a mechanism for retracting cover photos?
http://i56.tinypic.com/15dqc6q.jpg
😉
Re: steven mosher (Feb 9 16:22),
“So, Steig can argue that he didnt demand that the drop the TTLS in favor of ridge regression. Not explicitly.”
The silly thing is that both Ryan and NicL seem to agree with Reviewer A that ridge regression is better. And for much the same reasons.
I agree with Lucia. Steig can take his license to screw over O’Donnell over his academic matter and marinate in his festering hatred for McIntyre – it is his prerogative, but what was the need to pretend to the bystanders at Dot Earth and Air Vent that as though he was passing his erudite comments about a paper he hadn’t even supposedly read, when he had been the very reviewer for that paper, whose supposed obstructionism was a point of discussion there?
.
Eric Realclimate post attempts to address the reason behind Ryan’s ‘dam bursting’, but not the larger issue behind the whole episode.
.
Sickening.
Well back at the ‘Steig is guilty until proven guilty’ thread, it’s been a gala couple days for irony fans ….
.
Irony A statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention, notably as a form of humor; The quality or state of an event being both coincidental and contradictory …
.
E.g. 1 A rather shrill allegation of ‘duplicity’ is levelled, however to make the allegation, the accuser has to publish material he promised to keep private.
.
E.g. 2 A blogger flies in from a conference on ‘reconciliation’ then almost immediately approves this on his blog:-
.
There are not enough vulgar words in the English language to properly articulate my disgust at his blatant dishonesty and duplicity.
.
E.g. 3. The allegations of duplicity are convincingly rebutted, the accuser offers to withdraw them. Roughly contemperaneously, the original accusatory article sprouts a load of ‘[snip]’ tags.
.
E.g. 4. The accused : Sadly, attacking climate scientists by mis-quoting and mis-representing private correspondences or confidential materials appears now to be the primary modus operandi of climate change deniers. To those that still don’t get this — [] I’d be happy to share with you some of the more, err, ‘colorful’, emails I’ve gotten from O’Donnell and his coauthors.
.
E.g. 5. Steig’s email server is invaded and his private and ‘colorful’ mails released. Tom ‘publishing private mail is dishonorable’ Fuller adds a chapter to his book.
Ok, I made the last one up.
Yup.
Nick:
The even sillier part is that you missed that Reviewer A liked the method, until he didn’t.
As far as I can tell, all of the various methods work about the same, Steig’s bloviating not withstanding.
Unless you just do it wrong, as Steig clearly has done in S09.
Shub– It’s true Eric did not read the final version. But I think the comment at Jeff’s was pro-actively misleading. (By pro-active, I think Eric just decided to do this without an particular prompting.) That was stupid, unneceesary and counter productive.
I also think if he wrote a private cover letter to the editor that said this:
It was then utterly idiotic to start the review sent to the authors read like this:
This is followed with “Problems with the paper (hereafter RO10) fall into five basic classes:” and proceeds to vomit up endless criticisms and problems, never seeming to say anything that seems to read positive to me until we get to page 12 where we have one single hopeful sentence “RO10 have done some useful and potentially publishable work.”
To me, that Steig can now say– evidently– without shame “The fact of the matter is that my reviews of O’Donnell’s paper were on balance quite positive.” is just amazing to me. Wow. Just Wow.
Eric Steig’s reply to RyanO would appear to fit my impression with how Steig and some others do climate science. In S(09) there are a number of weaknesses and errors that RyanO and O(10) have shown and they did it with much effort and literature searching plus using the sensitivity testing that Steig and S(09) failed to do.
Now does Steig feel, as a scientist, an obligation to answer RyanO in kind. His reply would say no. His purpose appears to be to state, and again here without evidence, that those doing the criticism are not to be trusted or paid any attention. He calls them deniers.
The bigger issue is why Steig would think he has given a legitimate reply and why woulod other Team members would stand by his actions.
Phil Clarke,
I think you are being a little blinkered. While Steig has now presented his own side, I don’t see how the original claims have been “convincingly rebutted”. The key question is whether Reviewer A insisted that O et al use ridge regression and then proceeded to criticize that very choice. Steig claims he did not: (“First, I never suggested to the authors that they use ‘iridge’. This was an innovation of O’Donnell and his co-authors, and I merely stated that it ‘seems’ reasonable.”). O’Donnell’s quote from Steig’s review comment is: “My recommendation is that the editor insist that results showing the ‘mostly [sic] likely’ West Antarctic trends be shown in place of Figure 3. [the ‘most likely’ results were the ridge regression results]”
I remain seriously unconvinced that Steig has the winning hand (though perhaps more context will change that).
Lucia
Why idiotic?
In both your extracts Steig can be paraphrased as
1. The paper needs substantial rework to provide a substantive contribution to the science, however
2. The analysis has merit, but does not support the discussion and conclusions drawn.
Utterly consistent, seems to me. Or is Steig’s worst offence being overly kind in describing his reviews as ‘positive, on balance’?
Phil Clarke
.
You can celebrate but,
.
the charges of duplicity are not rebutted.
What a very instructive thread this has been. 🙂
One comment on moderation policies: while the moderation policy at RealClimate appears somewhat draconian, it occurs to me that the adoption of a dramatically more draconian moderation policy by lucia for this thread (and perhaps even the application of it to her very own OP) might have been the wisest course of action.
Brid, Shub
So – do you think Steig is being truthful when he says that ‘Ryan has offered to retract these allegations, now that he is a little better acquainted with the facts’ ?
.
Could it be really be that your deep appreciation of Steig’s sinfulness is better than Ryan’s?
.
Just askin’
“David Gould (Comment#68741)
February 9th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
What a very instructive thread this has been.”
David,
Did Dr. Hansen ever get back to you about the building thermometers question?
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
Unfortunately not. But I discovered that he has indeed built thermometers, at least of the kind for measuring temperatures of planets from space.
Phil
Kind to whom? To himself?
Steig claiming this seems to me to be trying to paint Steig sound good and O’Donnel and Id as bad. In reality, Steig’s reviews read at first, hostile and seen mostly unhelpful, designed to create work and to try to exert as much of his own spin on the paper as he can given knowledge of how the peer review process works in practice. (Not in theory.)
That he can pull out a single sentence from a cover letter the authors would never see doesn’t change that.
In later stages of the reveiw– I don’t know if they read mostly favorable or not. I get lost because I don’t want to keep track off all the references back to various different revisions. But rest assured that if they read mostly favorable to the editor the editor would have just approved the paper, and would not have replaced Steig as a reviewer.
Lots of that post at RC are Steig spinning like a washing machine. But he can count on some people — particularly those either unfamiliar with peer review — or who are already looking for something to embrace– to spin right along with him.
Lucia, Agreed.
nick, Agreed.
Carrick. Agreed
I can definitely chalk this one up to an “honest” misunderstanding.
where Steig recommends using the most likely results without explicitly realizing that this means using ridge and where Ryan and others see this
as a requirement to put TTLS aside. reading the reviewers mind. A view which is then confirmed by Steig acknowledging that he thought ridge would be better.
And, everyone should take Boris’ advice. except mikeC and bugs. What a mess.
Now I could be really self serving and say that they should have listened to me and others who suggested that they work together. too easy.
Personally, I’m staying out of this one from now on. Way too hard to be objective.
And yes, I’ll take a beating that anybody wants to administer to me for statements that indicated this was clear cut. It’s ambiguous enough to have a long life.
David Gould–
Except I don’t regret anything I wrote!
I think Shub might avoid “screw over” etc.
steven mosher,
You get a lot of respect from me (for what that’s worth) for comment 68746.
Phil,
I thought long and hard about where exactly Dr Eric Steig’s duplicity might lie in this whole episode. You can do a quick search for the words – ‘pulled this trick’ and ‘benefit of the doubt’ on this page to examine my stance.
.
I do not know what Ryan has “offered to retract”. I will wait for his post to appear.
.
My charges of ‘Steig’s sinfulness’ concern issues that are independent of the internal details of this specific paper and relate more to the review process itself. They also relate to Steig’s online behavior. You can search this page for the phrases ‘Dot Earth’ and ‘Air Vent’. I laid out these, well before Eric Steig’s post at RC, as did Lucia.
lucia,
You disappoint me (for what that’s worth).
In attempting to make sense of Steigs comments I can only come up with categorizing them as the actions and reactions of a complete opportunist.
He seems to be reacting to the blowing winds with a wetted finger always extended. He evidently was intent in his review in getting something out of O(10) to the effect that different methodologies come up with essentially the same results as S(09). It would appear the reason he was not afforded a look at the fourth draft was that he was dismissed as a reviewer for what well could have been reasons of obstruction. What other reason would there be for his not reading the final draft?
His next efforts appeared to be to endear himself to Ryan and Jeff and get them to tone down their stating that there were major differences in results between S(09) and O(10).
The next step appeared to be a campaign to have his supporters “see” no differences in the results of S(09) and O(10).
His collegial attitude toward the O(10) authors except for SteveM then was evidently to pay sufficient dividends that he could make a deeper defense of S(09) while criticizing O(10) with some rather obvious hand waving. Even after his renewed defense of S(09) at RC with a some snark throw in, the feeling appeared to be that Steig’s a good guy and therefore let us cut him some slack – and the position that seemed to be that of some of those who saw the errors in S(09). Then came RyanO’s reaction.
Now comes Steig with the implication that the authors are, or at least are part of the cabal of, deniers and thus are not to be trusted.
If my characterization of Steig is accurate he would have been given the label of an operator in the day.
David,
Fair enough. If he ever gets back to you with other relevant info, let us know!
Andrew
Re: Carrick (Feb 9 17:13),
“The even sillier part is that you missed that Reviewer A liked the method, until he didn’t.”
Well, I’m addressing the complaint that Rev A made us weaken our paper. The authors think iridge is the way to go – Rev A says he’s OK with their suggestion.
Later it turns out that the trend comes out lower than S09, and S thinks iridge is responsible. Well, if it’s true he should say so.
I agree there is a hint of “they should have foreseen that”, which is annoying, because if so then Rev A should have foreseen it too. But for that lapse in tact, the sequence seems OK.
Shub-
I assume RyanO will retract that
* Steig new things he could only have known by reading the response to Steig’s 3rd review. Steig didn’t get it, so that wasn’t true.
* Steig forced his to elevate the use of a particular method to primary, which was never literaly true. On reading of the reviews seems to make it appear Steig was insisiting to the extent that a reviewer has the power to insist; it appears Steig didn’t mean it to read that way.
(I assess Steig’s writing to be confusing on this point. Given that authors cannot quickly get these things clarified, much of that fault lies on the side of Steig. And this is true notwithstanding the fact that reviewrs cannot force authors to do anything. Authors can always chose to exit the review process after numerous exchanges and start all over somewhere else. Just as anyone can always quit their job if their boss insists on something icky. etc. Steig is perfectly right on that. Right?)
Phil Clarke,
I don’t know what it means to “offer to retract”. As a certain diminutive alien would put it: retract or retract not; there is no offer.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Feb 9 17:51),
“What other reason would there be for his not reading the final draft? “
Simple. The editor thinks he’s had his say, and didn’t send it. Do you think they should have asked for more comments from him?
David Gould:
Hansen’s a theoretician, David. Let’s see a link to where he’s personally “built” a thermometer, of any sort?
Lucia will only disappoint me if she doesn’t toast Steig over this latest piece of tripe of his.
I judge RyanO to be an honest broker and if there were any possible or potential misinterpretation of Steig’s actions as Reviewer A he will state them publically.
That being said I would not anticipate his changing his mind on the weaknesses of Steig’s defenses of S(09) or his critiques of O(10)
Nick Stokes:
Well we agree on this, to a point. But, I don’t think O’Donnell is actually saying the reviewer’s suggestion weakened the paper: They adopted it because it made the paper stronger, and they’ve said as much. (However, the results in this case aren’t all that different to any of the other methods they’ve tried: Ryan can correct me if I’m wrong.)
What O’Donnell is pointing out is that Reviewer A/Steig suggested the method and then later criticized it, and that this seems a bit two faced. The more interesting point is it also seems as well to be generally wrong.
I think there’s no news flash here that Steig has an ego the size of Mt Everest, you kind of need that to make it in the academic world. At some point though, he’s going to have to come to terms with the fact that his original analysis was wrong and his results were therefore misleading. I can think of few things worse than a Nature front cover that turns in to an “Oy vey! My bad!”
I state my case, all climate blogs… whether pro warming, lukewarming, or denier should go back to data analysis.. this is too boring (for me anyway). Apologies ladies and gentlemen. BTW you will find nothing significant hahaha
Carrick,
It is mentioned in Storms of My Grandchildren, which I do not have on me at the moment. I will get the page number and details for you tomorrow. However, I admit that you are likely correct: thinking about it, it is much more likely that he worked on the design rather than built it personally. So I may well have misinterpreted.
If Eric ‘suggested’/’recommended’/’favored’/’seemed pleased’ with one method at review,
.
and then turns around and declares now, that authors could have chosen to withdraw their paper and go to a different journal, if they did not like his offerings regarding that method
.
and the paper under review was a rebuttal/refinement of Eric’s own paper
.
then, the issue of academic gatekeeping cannot be simply wished away.
.
How the heck are O’Donnell et al supposed to realize that Eric was throwing out trick questions during review? You take a reviewer for his word. If a reviewer suggests, you comply, as long as you can. This is just maths, not mol bio, where the mice have all been sacked or the culture plates have all dried up.
.
Nick, thanks for pointing out that ‘lapse’. I pointed out the same thing at Bart’s place as well There is a conflict of interest at the heart of that lapse.
David, I can well believe that Hansen could come up with a new method for measuring temperature from a satellite, that somebody else later built. I still would be interested in seeing the reference if you can locate it.
I read what Eric Steig wrote at RC. Some of what he says is certainly correct (lack of knowledge of the final version of the paper, for example) and some is appears self serving (insisting his comments were mainly positive, when a simple reading of the text shows they were in fact mainly very negative). Ultimately the editor (apparently) came to the conclusion that Steig’s many remaining concerns were without merit, and instead took the advice of the other three reviewers. The last part of his post (“I was wrong, you just can’t trust these kinds of people or believe anything they say”) is simply rubbish; the lead author of a paper that is being largely refuted has lots of axes to grind, even if he is unaware of his own grinding.
.
Eric has never addressed the real issue: the method of Steig (09) produces elevated warming in West Antarctica by simply transferring warming from the peninsula to West Antarctia as Ryan O has shown (yet again): http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/nailcoffin.png As Ryan O points out, any match between West Antarctica ground station data and the Steig et al reconstruction is purely coincidence. I do hope people remember that this obvious smearing of the peninsula heat to other areas was the principle objection made by the O’Donnell authors (and others), long before any paper was written. That Eric steadfastly refused to consider that this might in fact be the case, and apparently continues to do so today, even in the face of Ryan O’s graphics using Steig’s own 3 PC method, gives me reason to honestly doubt most everything Eric says.
I agree with this comment that surprisingly made onto RC:
Ged says:
9 Feb 2011 at 5:37 PM
As a published scientist in another field, I am discouraged by what I see here.
Why is there being given any attention to personal attacks? This should be ignored as irrelevant! The only thing that should be talked about here is the actual science.
O’Donnall gave a scientific rebuttle to your previous post in his, which has not been addressed here, and which -should be- above all the primary focus of any forward discourse.
For, you see, science is based only on data and evidence, not personal reputations. The data will stand for itself, and any who attack you personally will have their own words heaped on their heads if you simply ignore it and deal only with the scientific matters at hand. The science is the only proof you need!
And yet, I see no science here. Their most serious allegations are those showing the Steig et al (09) model’s algorithm/methods to be seriously flawed in its infilling response to data changes in the stations used. A very serious matter indeed for all reconstruction and modeling.
We scientists should be swayed only by data and results, and I would like to see the truth of the matter, scientifically, illuminated by yourself so we can produce the most accurate representation of what is occurring on our planet. The personal allegations against yourself, which as a reader on this from the start I believe have been overly hyped and given too much importance by both sides, will burn themselves out before actual information. Otherwise, this will devolve into high school “He said she saidsâ€. You must rise above it, and set an example in so doing so.
In the end, all choices are yours, if you heed or care about my words or not. I, and other people and scientists interested in the actual information and data, long greatly for a scientific, not personal, rebuttle by yourself to O’Donnall’s points.
[Response: I don’t disagree. I wrote a scientific commentary already, in which I pointed out some problems with their arguments, and also acknowledged that they had some good scientific points. This is the way it ought to work, and indeed many people wrote in to thank me for the substance and style. Unfortunately, O’Donnell’s reponse was to call me ‘duplicitous’. I could have ignored it, but since many people — who ought to know better — were not ignoring it, but seemed to be believing it, I felt the need to correct the misconceptions. Get it? –eric]
Interesting that people focused on this question:
“Are you now or have you ever been reviewer A?’
when perhaps they should have been focusing on this question:
“Are we sure that RyanO is correct in his interpretation of reviewer A?”
and now, having run into that second question all of a sudden, they want to return to ‘the science’.
A most instructive thread indeed.
SteveF:
It’s as I’ve pointed out: Steig’s graphic made it to front cover of Nature, his relatives probably all have signed copies now (tough to roll that back in). Criticizing one particular method, when all of the methods done right give very similar answers (in this case), is little more than a red herrring and a distraction from the fact that what Steig did was very much wrong.
Yes the data will stand… and it shows nothing. Please lets get back to the raw data, not adjusted etc.
David Gould, that was one focus, there were many others. What you wrote was not a fair summary, and no I’m not disappointed in you for your lack of fairness. 😉
Steve Reynolds, Ged made a very interesting comment. It would hold a lot more water though, if RC actually allowed real scientific discussion on their blog, instead of just the hallelujah choir nonsense. With unbiased moderation of commenters, Steig and the others could never get away with half of the crap they do. And of course it’s astounding that Steig, after all this, cries victimhood.
Wow.
This is real time reality
http://processtrends.com/images/RClimate_UAH_Ch5_latest.png from a warmista site BTW
Just wanted to say – it was encouraging to see Lucia holding out for clear-cut facts before coming to conclusion 🙂
Carrick,
The OP was completely about that question. However, yes, there have been many other questions raised. But I believe that my comment is a fair summary of a significant part of this discussion by a significant number of commentators on this thread.
Steve Reynolds (Comment#68765),
.
I also agree with the comment… and I am very surprised it passed moderation. However, please note that the commenter’s request:
.
Their most serious allegations are those showing the Steig et al (09) model’s algorithm/methods to be seriously flawed in its infilling response to data changes in the stations used. A very serious matter indeed for all reconstruction and modeling.
.
Was brushed off with “I wrote a scientific commentary already, in which I pointed out some problems with their arguments, and also acknowledged that they had some good scientific points”, thus avoiding the substance of issue raised. All commentary by Eric Steig to date does not even try address the issue raised by this commenter: the fundamental discrepancy between Steig(09) and Odonnell(10).
Stephan, 10-year trends aren’t particularly meaningful (unless you make Lucia-styled adjustments) because of the confounding effects of atmospheric-ocean oscillations, if what you want to look for is an anthropogenic signal in climate change. I tend to go with 30-year averages. Kind of like this.
Re previous according to some warmistas, due to warming, the floods in Australia and Brazil and snowstorms up in US occurred due to AGW when in fact this was happening
http://processtrends.com/images/RClimate_UAH_Ch5_latest.png
BELOW ANOMALY, por favor….
You can sell this either way to people who are keen to buy in.
Same old arguments by the same old people really.
And at this point I will take my own advice. 🙂
In this we should agree with the warmistas.. too many humans foreinstance 24 billion would not be healthy for this planet..
David Gould:
Bah, subjective nonsense.
Show me the linguistic analysis!
I tend to skip over parts of a thread I don’t find interesting, rather than posting a comment that I didn’t find them interesting. Again I’m not disappointed in you that you choose another path. 8D
SteveReynolds–
But as you see, the article at RC containing so much self-serving material, some of which is impossible to connect to reality (i.e. his reviews were on the balance favorable) will tend to reinforce the notion that he might be uhmmm… which adjective do you prefer? Disingenous? Misleading? Dup…dup…what’s that word?
Carrick,
But I chose the same path you did: I found those comments very interesting. And I am glad that I am not disappointing you. 🙂 (Although I have disappointed myself by breaking my vow of silence … it is so easy to become addicted to posting.)
Carrick, I Totally agree, more like 1000 years is meaningful in climate terms, the rest is weather. The graph I link to is of course meaningless but they (warmist) use it as an example.
Stephan:
I’m not going to make any excuse for people who write silly nonsense.
The closest to a real argument would be that humans are forcing weather by adding CO2, which increases moisture content of the atmosphere as a feedback. That is a real meteorological consequence of increased CO2 concentrations, there are others… (e.g., increased equatorial convection, increased precipitation, etc).
I’ll still take a rainier, warmer world over a colder, drier one.
David==
People?
I wrote posts focusing on the question of whether Eric is reviewer A. While I was focusing on that quote a few “people” here complained that I focused on that. Kenneth, Ron even Stephan (who keeps wanting me to write a post on temperature trends).. I could find more. I am not suddenly saying let’s return to the science.
It’s hardly fair to complain that Kenneth who wanted to focus on the science all along, or Stephan who periodically complained we should be looking at temperature trends continue to want to get back to topics they have wanted to discuss all along!
There are plenty of people still discussing the RC post as am I. There is even someone telling me they will be disappointed if I don’t comment on the RC thread with a blog post. So I honestly have no idea what you believe you have observed.
Also- FWIW, the reasona I wasn’t concerned on whether RyanO interpreted ReviewerA correctly are:
1) If Steig wasn’t reviewer A, that didn’t matter. So, we needed to resolve who Reviewer A was and
2) I my opinion, Steig appears disingenous and misleading whether or not Ryan was correct to believe Steig read the response to the 3rd review, and whether or not RyanO interpreted Reveiwer A correctly.
3) If Steig was reviewer A, he behaved badly in not discussing the contents of his earlier post at RC whether or not RyanO misundertsood the review.
But once again, there was no point in elaborating on point 2 or 3 unless Steig was reviewer A. That said, some of these elements appear in spread out in comments, as I have said most.
Carrick: I would too, think that a warmer world is better, However I do not agree that human produced C02 has any significant effect on weather or climate. I personally think the sun is doing most of it and we are probably going into a mini ice age (hopefully not major!). I respect your thinking. We shall see, (if we live for another 1000 years), LOL
“Simple. The editor thinks he’s had his say, and didn’t send it. Do you think they should have asked for more comments from him?”
Nick Stokes, what you say is just another version of what I said. The initiative was from the editor and not Steig. What do you think was the position of the editor after three reviews and 88 pages? Would Steig have given another reply had he had the chance? Has he ever really stopped replying and reframing the issues?
Lucia, decorum requires that you let us know whether you are disappointed with David’s comments. >.>
Stephan, I’m pretty convinced by the arguments given by the solar physicists… (but then why did it warm from 1900-1945?). I also know that the underlying radiative physics is right, being a physicist helps in that respect. The unknown is what happens when we unleash that CO2 into a real climate, instead of into a laboratory beaker.
[PS: Like Boris, I have a snow day.. down here in Oxford.]
Carrick–
Do you mean a different “David” comment from the one I just discussed. I value David’s comments, but I have no idea how he formulated that particular opinion.
Stephan–
I would prefer you cease discussing temperature trends, or issues unrelated to this thread. We already have enough comment on this topic, it is live and your attempt to thread jack to a topic that suits you is distracting.
I am usually more lenient, but you are free to visit the trend on January’s UAH temperature and hope someone else interested in that topic come talk to you. That thread is still open.
update: Stephan and I cross posted. I moved the comment about temperature trends to a post about temperature trends.
“and now, having run into that second question all of a sudden, they want to return to ‘the science’.”
Surely Eric Steig in his reply has not returned to the science. RyanO’s reply to Steig was loaded with technical arguments, but Steig has limited his reply to stating that the authors are after all deniers and simply not to be trusted. I suppose we could simply take his word for this just like we were evidently expected to take his word for O(10) got it wrong on the warming (amount) of West Antarctica.
It is your choice to simply follow the Team leaders and end the discussion there. In fact that path is no brainer.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Feb 9 18:59),
“What do you think was the position of the editor after three reviews and 88 pages?”
I did a count of these famous 88 pages. In fact, Rev A wrote 24 in total. The rest is the author responses.
But we don’t need to speculate on what the position of the editor would have been. He said:
“Rather than request further revision at this time, I would simply like the authors to respond to Rev. A. For each issue identified in the review, they can respond by either by describing changes they would make to their manuscript or explaining why they disagree with the reviewer. Upon receipt of their response a formal decision will be rendered.â€
In other words, that’s enough.
Kennet–
That’s not quite fair to David, He’s never shown evidence of “simply follow[ing] Team leaders” or anyone in particular,
RC isn’t the only site with selective moderation. Here’s something I posted at CA nearly two hours ago:
———————————————————–
Posted Feb 9, 2011 at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Reply
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Re: GaryM (Feb 9 17:29),
Here’s your quote with a little emphasis:
“Perhaps, as the authors suggest, kgnd should not be used at all, but the results from the ‘iridge’ infilling should be used instead….â€
And indeed, the authors seem to thing iridge is a good idea. Here’s Ryan and NicL.
——————————————————————–
The latest post that has appeared at CA is stamped 8.01 pm.
I agree with Nick’s interpretation on this one by the way. It is true that Steig never saw the final version of the paper, so it’s reasonable for him to request a copy.
This is bizarre. I decided to post a complaint here about moderation at CA. And in big bold letters I see:
Thank you for your comment! It has been added to the moderation queue and will be published here if approved by the webmaster.
The post in question, in plain text, is:
************************************
RC isn’t the only site with selective moderation. Here’s something I posted at CA nearly two hours ago:
———————————————————–
Posted Feb 9, 2011 at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Reply
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Re: GaryM (Feb 9 17:29),
Here’s your quote with a little emphasis:
“Perhaps, as the authors suggest, kgnd should not be used at all, but the results from the ‘iridge’ infilling should be used instead….â€
And indeed, the authors seem to thing iridge is a good idea. Here’s Ryan and NicL.
——————————————————————–
The latest post that has appeared at CA is stamped 8.01 pm.
*************************************
Maybe kgnd is a no-no?
> “and now, having run into that second question all of a sudden, they want to return to ‘the science’.
???
You’ll have to specify the “they.” but I think you are overall wrong, here.
There’s at least two interesting science issues. I’ll call one Pure and the other Meta.
Pure — Steig 09 performed an analysis of combined weather-station and satellite records, and concluded that (a) the Antarctic Peninsula is warming a whole lot, (b) West Antarctica is warming a lot, and (c) the whole of Antarctica is experiencing statistically-significant warming. This paper got a lot of attention, including the cover of Nature magazine.
So, is Steig’s analysis correct? O’Donnell et al claim it isn’t. This isn’t splitting hairs or six of one, half-dozen of the other. O’Donnell is saying Steig is mathematically wrong. Steig is saying O’Donnell’s approach is invalid.
Mathemeticians can look at the math. I’m waiting for Steig to explain O’Donnell’s graphical depiction of Steig’s method’s insensitivity to synthetic trends added to West Antarctic weather station records. See upthread.
Meta — A common complaint among skeptics is that the pro-AGW Consensus establishment plays on a tilted field. “Science” as it is practiced thus doesn’t correctly represent “science” as an accurate depiction of the physical world. So, in this instance, were the rules of the game “fair” to amateurs who started out with a non-establishment point of view?
One of the factual considerations that figures into that is, “Was Steig Reviewer A?” Well, now we know. So why wouldn’t “returning to the science” (moving along to unresolved questions) be the natural next step?
Re: Nick Stokes (Feb 9 19:12),
> I did a count of these famous 88 pages. In fact, Rev A wrote 24 in total.
Thanks for that, it sounds right. “88” always seemed like hyperbole. IIRC, Jeff Id discounted that early on, but the meme had taken hold. 24 is plenty.
Nick Stokes (Comment#68800),
.
Don’ t take it personally Nick. It has happened to me for no apparent reason as well a few times. It is an automatic system and apparently thought you might not really be human or were using too many questionable words. Don’t worry, it is rare.
At this point I would be very reluctant to take Steig’s word that he never saw the final version of the paper. Not that my belief in his veracity is of any importance. There are many scenarios one can envision where he would be able to adopt a copy. And I’m sure he had an interest.
Nick, I dunna about the moderation at CA. I’ve never had a problem with moderation there. RC OTH is just insane the way they are moderating now.
Did you try writing Steve Mc?
AMac,
“I’m waiting for Steig to explain O’Donnell’s graphical depiction of Steig’s method’s insensitivity to synthetic trends added to West Antarctic weather station records.”
Please don’t choose to hold your breath while you wait. 😉
chuckr (Comment#68805) ,
I take him at his word on that.
Re: SteveF (Feb 9 19:45),
I don’t see any reason to doubt that Steig didn’t see the final verson of O’Donnell et al. In my experience, it was common for a reviewer to not see the final version of a paper. Once it’s approved for publication, the editor’s focus moves to the next stage.
I think the move to web-based document management has improved reviewers’ knowledge of papers’ ultimate fates. But getting a pre-publication copy of the final, corrected version wouldn’t necessarily be in the reviewer’s remit.
.
I’ve had a couple of comments stuck in moderation at CA. There doesn’t seem to have been all that much rhyme or reason, except >1 hyperlink (including “reply to”). More than half the time, writing to SMcI didn’t seem to help 🙁
Re: Nick Stokes,
Yes. That comment was moderated. I have no idea why. I use SpamNX and Akismet now. Akismet must dislike something in that comment.
This is bit of a follow-up to my Comment#68578 above:
* Now that the identity of Steig as referee A is quite out in the open, Ryan needs to take down his reviews that he posted. I suggest that all links to those reviews need to disappear. Ryan simply has no right to make them public without Steig’s explicit permission.
* To be safe, I would strongly advise Ryan to take down the links to the other (still anonymous) reviews as well, for two reasons. First, the Journal of Climate may not like having so much of its internal decision process exposed for all the world to see, and if you ever want to publish there again you should try to stay on their good side.
Second, upon reflection, I have concluded that it is one thing to share an anonymous review you have received with a few friends, informally, and a potentially very different thing to post it on the Internet where everyone can see it, including perhaps people who would be sufficiently familiar with the reviewer’s style or expertise to be able to identify him or her, and notify people who have no business knowing about it.
I would not dilly-dally on this, either. Ryan has already placed himself in a very tricky position as it is.
Nick,
Obviously, the CA spam filter likes “the weasel” more than it likes you.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/07/eric-steigs-trick/#comment-254176
Nick
I think it wasn’t the words that was the problem but the number of links.
In your post here that went to moderation in Comment #68796 it has 5 different links (Permalink, Reply, GaryM (Feb 9 17:29), Ryan and NicL).
I know in WordPress blogs there is an option that only allows up to 2 links without going through moderation. So if Lucia is using a Worpress base and has this option in effect it would flip it into moderation. As to CA I know that is WordPress based (It’s on the WordPress servers) and your post had more then 2 links and CA also has that option in effect it would trip moderation. If you remember back to the Air Vent it also only allowed two links, more then that it went to moderation.
To illustrate what I mean about blogs can be set to flip comments with 2 or more links into moderation here is a link to a screencap of the setting page from a Worpress Blog:
http://tinypic.com/r/ae8xo7/7
SteveF (Comment#68773) and Lucia (68780),
RyanO etal have made their peer review point by now (which I agree with, others can draw their own conclusions from copious data now).
I think getting Steig to address Ged’s questions seems the more productive activity.
Julio
What a piece of work, man.
.
It is ok for Steig to be the reviewer and pretend that he is not, out in the open, but it is not ok for Steig to be the reviewer, and be known that he was?
.
What is done is done. Steig should have paused a bit before pushing the ‘publish’ button at Realclimate. Ryan was right. Where are all the pros and cons of the iridge method, Steig the reviewer identified, mentioned at Realclimate?
.
For the record, all these calls for punitive action against O’Donnell et al, from you, and the megaphone at Realclimate, is easily foreseen. It was foreseen, and predicted well in advance. See here: http://bit.ly/fxhhLc . See comment number 68374 and 68377 in the Blagojevich thread. These comments were made a day-and-half ahead of time.
Re: Shub Niggurath (Comment#68819)
I’m not “calling” for any action against Ryan et al. I’m just pointing out that he has placed himself in a tricky position.
For the record, all my posts on this subject have been sympathetic to Ryan, while all the while struggling to understand what could have possessed Steig to make him act in a manner as stupid and seemingly dishonest as followed from Ryan’s account. Now I’m not saying I completely buy Steig’s account of things–anybody who feels the need to tack on an unqualified endorsement of Mann to any screed cannot be 100% trustworthy. But I definitely suspect that it was wrong of me to take all of Ryan’s claims at face value, as well.
This was apparently another over-reaction by the folks over at Climate Audit. Color me unimpressed.
Lucia and anyone else exercised over Steig describing his reviews as generally positive,
I haven’t read the posted review content nor have I ever been involved in the review of a scientific paper but it seems to me some of you hold a bizarre conception of what a generally positive review would look like. Surely what is called for, unless the paper is perfect or so awful as to be beyond salvaging, is to provide constructive criticism. I can’t see why the reviewer should spend any significant verbiage on saying nice things about the paper – it’s rather difficult to improve a paper based on a comment saying “this part is good” whereas a comment saying ” this part isn’t so good and might be fixed by doing this” could actually be useful.
Yes Mosh, he said have 2 beers before commenting, not before going to the bath house
Re: Jon ,
I’ve read reviews. I’ve read the Reviewer A reviews, and certainly the first one. It is true that discussing the problems to be corrected is appropriate and helpful. An example of a favorable review that does that is Reviewer 4.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone with a grip on reality can characterize the Steig review 1 as on the balance favorable. I don’t read the later ones as on the balance favorable– but as I noted, by Review 3 the referals back to changes in various previous manuscripts makes it confusing and difficult to follow without devoting copious amounts of time to precisely what was in each review ad each revision so it is more difficult to assess.
I should note that even in the cover letter sent to the editor supposedly expressing how Eric liked it Eric suggested “a fundamentally reworked version of this manuscript”. Reviews that require fundamentally reworked versions of a manuscript are not on the balance favorable. They are suggesting that the idea is interesting, method maybe has some promise… or would… someday… if only a heck of a lot of work was done… etc. This is not “on the balance favorable”. It is “on the balance hostile” to “outright hostile but wedging in something gives the editor an impression that you are really, really hunting and trying to find a tiny nub of good in the thing and might possibly contemplate the paper being accepted under some hypothetical circumstance but you really aren’t sure what that might be.”
Re: Jon (Feb 9 21:30),
A manuscript under review at a selective journal is in competition with other manuscripts for space. Thus, an important part of the reviewer’s job is to point out to the editor what the authors are doing that is worthwhile. You’re right, in the relatively rare cases where a MS is simply awful or simply wonderful, the reviewer’s job isn’t that important. But for most, the reviewer is “paid” (heh) to perform a balancing act, explaining both strengths and weaknesses. You can see my thoughts on A, B, C, and D upthread. A’s reviews were very, very negative, IMO.
Lucia, That Eric did any of those things is a suprise to you???
Boris,
You’d be colored unimpressed if someone threw a bucket of fluorescent orange paint on you.
Re: lucia (Feb 9 21:42),
I believe reviews 2 and 3 are favourable. Review 2 starts:
“O’Donnell et al. have substantially improved their manuscript and clarified a series of items that led to some confusion on my part (for example, my impression that they had detrended the satellite data). I appreciate the great amount of work that has gone into this manuscript, and the thorough documentation of the results.
I also am convinced that the methods discussed are a substantive contribution to the literature and represent real improvements to the methods used in earlier work. I also think that main findings of the manuscript – that Steig et al.’s overestimate mean Antarctic temperature trends, particularly in winter in the Ross Sea region – are likely to be correct. This is important because it has implications for the causes of recent Antarctic temperature changes, for which the distribution of surface temperature variability and trends is a key test.
Unfortunately, the revised manuscript retains several important flaws in the original version, and I cannot support its publication in the Journal of Climate until these are addressed. The main criticism of the manuscript from my first review has not been adequately addressed, and other persistent problems lie in the way that general circulation modeling results and seasonal trends are discussed. All of these aspects of the manuscript need to be revised prior to publication, and another round of reviews conducted.”
and 3 concludes:
“In summary, this manuscript needs to be revised again, and sent again to review, before it can be considered acceptable for publication in the Journal of Climate. I emphasize again that I think that it should be published eventually, because it definitey has the potential to be a solid and oft-cited contribution. I thus I hope that the authors are not too put off by the several rounds of review. I do not think the manuscript will require more than minor re-writing to address the above criticisms (though perhaps substantial re-calculating will be needed), and I look forward to seeing a revised version in the near future.”
In each case he is saying that it is a paper that should be published. That’s something I always wanted to hear. And following the third review, the editor took him up on it.
Ryan says that Eric’s criticism of ‘iridge’ at Realclimate pushed him to reveal the identity of reviewer A.
.
Eric’s latest post – “I did not make them do ‘iridge’, they did it themselves” – addresses only that final push.
.
Eric has punished O’Donnell et al for having not been martyrs and succumbing to the simple temptation of seeing their paper published. His was the Shylockian bargain.
“O’Donnell et al. have substantially improved their manuscript and clarified a series of items that led to some confusion on my part (for example, my impression that they had detrended the satellite data). I appreciate the great amount of work that has gone into this manuscript, and the thorough documentation of the results.”
Does that sound anything like the RC article? Come-on Nick…WAKE UP!
Nick–
You are presumably aware of all the possible levels of review. A review that requires a revision and re-reviewed and substantial recalculation before it might be published eventually, with eventually including yet another look-see by the reviewer who has looked at it three times already is difficult to interpret as actually favorable. I find it difficult to even read that as “on the balance favorable”.
It is, at best, not hostile.
It’s worth noting that at this point, the editor took Eric out of the loop. I can’t read the editor’s mind, but his action is consistent with an editor who might very well agree with the co-authors that they are being given an endless runaround by someone who merely wishes to delay publication, and not the action of an editor who thinks that the 3rd review is actually favorable.
Re: intrepid_wanders (Feb 9 23:40),
“Does that sound anything like the RC article? Come-on Nick…WAKE UP!”
What’s that? You’re now saying that the reviews are more favorable than the RC article.
FWIW, I thought the RC article was favorable too, or at least respectful. His first para ends:
“in my view O’Donnell et al. is a perfectly acceptable addition to the literature. O’Donnell et al. suggest several improvements to the methodology we used, most of which I agree with in principle. Unfortunately, their actual implementation by O’Donnell et al. leaves something to be desired, and yield a result that is in disagreement with independent evidence for the magnitude of warming, at least in West Antarctica.”
And that’s what it amounts to. Their analysis was good, but the result is wrong. Well, it disagrees with his, and he still thinks his is correct. Saying such things is well within the normal range of well-mannered scientific discourse.
Re: lucia (Feb 9 23:48),
Lucia,
As you know, some journals do follow a policy of demanding revisions until they think it is right. J Fluid Mechs is one you’ll be familiar with. If I’d encountered Rev A there I’d have been overjoyed. Well, encouraged. And according to Judy, AMS Journals are like that.
While Rev A raised a lot of points, they were converging fast, as the part I quoted from round 3 showed. And I believe that’s why the editor thought he could call the process to a halt.
Nick:
I think the sensitivity analysis that O’Donnell provided and was very well explained by Andrew Montford is going to be key as to how much trust one should put in the Steig approach. Steig has to surely provide his own sensitivity analysis to demonstrate that he has in fact identified a coherent mechanism. O’Donnell current claim is that he has not.
Nick—
Of course journals demand revisions until they are right. What I am disputing is your characterization of that as “favorable”. It’s not.
My understanding is the editor brought in a 4th reviewer and also cut steig out of the loop entirely. Bringing in a 4th reviewer seems rather inconsistent with your interpretation of the editors reasons for halting the process of sending additional revisions to steig for review.
Papers get put through the absolute ringer all the time. Authors revise extensively all the time. Is ODonnell et al a better paper and more accurate having gone through reviewer A? I bet it is. Reviewer A is not the arbiter, the editor is and as much as we like to presume editors are dumb dumbs, this editor saw fit to obtain reviews from 4 people and allowed a paper to go through several revisions- this seems thorough. More than one revision and you should consider that the reviewers and editor are fighting for the paper on the balance, because you haven’t been told to stuff it. The alternative is always possible- the endless sandbag, but I don’t think that was the case here.
Nick–
I’m puzzled by your linking to that particular comment at Judy’s to support this:
In the comment you linked Judy wrote;
This has nothing whatsoever to do with AMS journals requiring revisions until papers are right. Mind you, I think nearly all decent journals require revisions until papers are ‘right’ or at least until the editor is satisfied.
But I really don’t see Judy commenting either on the typical path or time frame for a paper at JClimate, nor making any comment on this one in particular.
Did you mean to link to a different comment that might be more relevant to your point? I’d like to read it– but I can’t know which you intended unless you tell me.
Pinko Punko–
Could you elaborate: why do you discount the possibility of endless sandbagging?
Also, it seems to me that eric’s characterization as having provided reviews that were on the balance favorable would not be consistent with a paper that was “paper on the balance”. (I guessing English is not your first language and you are searching for the word ‘borderline”? Am I mistaken.)
It would seem rather odd that a borderline paper would receive two out right favorable reviews (i.e. those from B&C) one that eric now characterizes as on the balance favorable. If it was borderline, I would think one might expect at least one review that was on the balance unfavorable.
Re: lucia (Feb 10 00:33),
Well, her other comment that supports that is here
“O’Donnell got a tough review, AMS journals are known for that, the editor was somewhat lax in making the authors jump through hoops based on comments by a reviewer with a conflict of interest, but the paper got published”
“why do you discount the possibility of endless sandbagging”
Because the editor’s in control – a bit slow to act, perhaps, as Judy says, but still did act.
Steig should not be reviewing anything period.
Re: bernie (Feb 10 00:19),
I don’t think the Bishop can speak ex cathedra on this. The fact that changing a trend in one place produces effects elsewhere is just a consequence of finite number of EOF’s – it’s like a Gibbs effect. It would apply to any similar analysis. The insensitivity to the Byrd/Russkaya may be interesting – it just depends on how insensitive.
What Ryan didn’t show is how his model handles these tests.
Stephan–
Well that’s ridiculous!
Nick–
I was asking Pinko Punko. One reason I want to read his response is to better understand what he means by endless sandbagging. I didn’t expect him to mean the editor and reviewer colluding in sandbagging, but rather a reviewer trying to sandbag for as long as the editor would permit it. In which case, the editor ending it would not be evidence the reviewer was not trying to sandbag. It might be evidence the editor diagnosed the attempt.
Carrick (Comment#68715) February 9th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
On the matter of RC, then, I take it we agree that they can and have admitted mistakes. I posted a link to Gavin doing exactly that.
On the matter of Id, people can and do make intemperate remarks, but the fact is, he deleted comments that showed him in a bad light. If he had just said, “I blew it, my apologies”, that would be OK. Instead we get the usual blogroll putting up speeches in praise of Jeff and full of understanding why he has chosen to spend more time with his family. If a ‘warmer’ had done that, I can guarantee we would have had a blogstorm about it, and Mosher might have written a book, in between writing the long awaited book about how important he thinks AGW is, but is not so important that he can write books about the political side of AGW.
Re: Nick Stokes (Feb 9 19:19),
It’s not personal – any post with more than one link at CA goes into moderation – you should know this by now.
bugs, don’t be any more of a hypocrite than you have to be.
On a single night, there were probably a dozen Eric comments made and edited away (none of them were apologies).
Jeff deletes a comment that he made because it was offensive to some and you get weepy about it. (Whether Jeff should apologize is a straw man here, it’s not related to what is being discussed.)
As opposed to RC blocks dozens of comments because they undercut their arguments.
Nick Stokes:
Want to bet Ryan’s method is insensitive to addition of a peninsular temperature trend, as are TTLS and even Jeff’s simple area weighting scheme (which will handle this trivially)?
Maybe Ryan can amend his post with a graphic of a similar sensitivity analysis of his method.
I think Eric’s problems are not limited to the retention of too few PCs in his AVHRR data. Again, maybe Ryan can comment on this, since it’s his work.
Steven Mosher wrote:
.
.
I was happy to read those statements. They showed your true self.
.
Like Bugs says:
.
On honesty.
So, first Ryan called Eric dishonest, now Eric does the same about Ryan. Being dishonest means that you tell things that you know are not true. What Ryan described, he thought happened and that’s why he used the language he used. It can clearly not be regarded as dishonest as he wrote what he thought was true. Right at the beginning of his “O’Donnelgate” article, Eric states: “Ryan has offered to retract these allegations, now that he is a little better acquainted with the facts.” So, Eric knows that Ryan did not act on just ill will and dishonesty, but rather was not “acquainted” with some facts. This can hardly be regarded as dishonesty. And the fact that Ryan betrayed Eric’s confidence by revealing the identity of reviewer A, can be well understood on the basis of the information available to Ryan at the time.
Now, what is the basis for Eric to call Ryan dishonest? Meaning – saying things that he knows to be untrue? I really can’t tell.
And to prevent claims that Eric never called Ryan dishonest (the word that he really did not use), here are just some quotes from “O’Donnellgate” that clearly say that in his oppinion Eric and “McIntire and his associates” are not honest (a two word equivalent of dishonest):
– “…intelligent-seeming people still seem to treat these guys as legitimate, honest commenters…”
– “To those that still don’t get this — and who continue to believe that these people can be trusted to present their scientific results honestly…”
– “…warned me many times not to trust the good intentions of O’Donnell, Condon, and McIntyre. I have ignored them, evidently to my peril.”
The morale of the story (for me at least)?
a) civility in climate debate is not weak, it’s non-existent
b) never write anything in anger. 99.9% of Ryan’s article was scientific, but can now be waved away by Eric because of a couple of words on duplicity etc. that were based on (it seems a wrong) impression. And thus the whole thorough scientific analysis and argumentation is deliberately interpreted as an “ad hominem”, turned into a propaganda tool against the “deniers” and not worth responding… Though not much was changed (only the name calling and claims that “Eric knew”), if the text would have been like it is now at Climate Audit, it would have been much much more difficult for RC to handle.
c) peer review (at least in as highly politicized sciences as climate) process is in a bad state (or at least vulnerable to abuse) and can put science as such in a bad light
d) What Judith Curry has started is highly commendable, but I really don’t believe it will bring any results. I think it will only end many years from now when the “real world” facts will make one or the other side’s position unequivocal
Neven:
You’re quoting bugs? That’s a way to establish credibility!
This is a straw man argument. We’re talking about whether people edit or suppress comments that damage their argument, you and bugs are whining like little girls because of an off the cuff remark that was inappropriate, recognized as such, and deleted.
The real irony is Jeff was defending your use of the word “denialist,” a term many Jewish Holocaust survivors find offensive in this context, and you’re acting all girly sensitive about inappropriate language on Jeff’s part that would be similarly offensive to these same Jewish people that your own language choices would be!!! (“happy” was inappropriate, it was obvious meant ironically, if you’re that f**king stupid, just get stuffed.)
Sven, the other part of the take home message is you need look no further than RealClimate, if you want to understand why there is a divide: They intentionally foment it themselves, which is why I generally ignore their self-aggrandizing tripe.
Carrick,
I know…
Carrick (Comment#68867) February 10th, 2011 at 5:18 am
a term many Jewish Holocaust survivors find offensive in this context,
= = = = = = = = = = = = =
So not because its a term many contrairians find offensive? He was suddenly concerned for those who had personal experiance with the Shoah. Can you fill us in with his other activism in this area.
dolormin, I have no idea what your point is. Do you even have one?
Also, dolormin, to fill you in, the argument was between Jeff and somebody who was claiming to be Jewish who was offended by the use of the “denialist” term. Of course there are “contrarians” who find the term “denialist” offensive for other reasons, just as you probably find being labelled an AGW conformist offensive to your own beliefs (though if the shoe fits…)
That Jewish people sometimes find “denialist” to be an offensive term should need no substantiation. Do you actually require this substantiation (e.g., are you capable of googling this on your own if you really don’t believe it)?
Work with me, even for you, this is a thoroughly muddled argument you’re trying to put forward.
Carrick (Comment#68873) February 10th, 2011 at 5:59 am
dolormin, I have no idea what your point is
= = = = = = = = = = = =
Stop using survivors as your personal glove puppet. Issue closed.
Well as long as we are discussing blogger ethics how about the Steve and Jeff act
denier, as in holocaust denier. learn your terms of art. denialist is different and more general
So, Josh is not just an expert on climate science, but ethics an semantics as well. My wonderment floweth over!!!
Sven (Comment#68866),
.
Thanks for those thoughtful comments. I agree that Ryan O’s posts would have been more effective without the accusations of dishonesty. The tragic part is that this is a case where an obviously incorrect paper retains a fig leaf of credibility because Eric and coauthors will now simply refuse to address the primary issue (that is, the S(09) method is wrong and yields an essentially meaningless reconstruction), based on the claim of O’Donnell being “not honest”.
Not at all a good couple of days for science.
By rockets red glare
Bunny re-educates us.
Here we are at camp.
============
Rabett joins the fray,
Attempts sleight of hand ploy,
Baghdad Bob is proud.
eli:
Same root word, some people claim find it offensive for reasons relating to the Holocaust (I don’t). I doubt microscopic nuances like this affect whether they should find it offensive or not.
I think this is an example of distinctions without a difference. And nice plug for your blog.
dolormin:
I don’t, neither does Jeff. He was objecting to a troll who was doing that.
Good. Let’s find something interesting to talk about, like when Eli will discuss science instead of semantics.
Or if semantics, how about whether RegEM is truly a TTLS scheme, or something different? Any takers?
Nick Stokes writes : “What Ryan didn’t show is how his model handles these tests.”
Do you mean graphically as he did in his followup post? Because he did give the figures for how his model handled the tests in his original post on tAV for example.
Nick Stokes:
“The fact that changing a trend in one place produces effects elsewhere is just a consequence of finite number of EOF’s – it’s like a Gibbs effect. It would apply to any similar analysis. The insensitivity to the Byrd/Russkaya may be interesting – it just depends on how insensitive.
What Ryan didn’t show is how his model handles these tests.”
.
IIRC, Ryan has already done those tests and has said that his method does not have the problems that S(09) has. He also said he would generate side-by-side graphics in the next couple of days. Nick, the weird thing about this is that even after O(10) gets published there seems to have been precious little movement by Eric on the central issue of contention. I hope you remember that the very first thing Ryan, Jeff, Steve Mc, and others said (a year ago!) was that 3 PC’s would smear warming from the peninsula to the rest of Antarctica. They have proven exactly that. I hope you also remember Eric’s “On Overfitting” post at RC, and his hostile, arrogant, and condescending comments to some of the O(10) authors about claims of too few PC’s in S(09).
.
The bottom line Nick is that S(09) implemented a clever approach in an incorrect way, and generated a bunch of non-sense results that found their way, in impressive graphical form, to the cover of Nature. Leading to ever more cries of (surprise!)…. “It’s much worse than we thought!”
.
I think that this sorry episode reflects badly on the state of peer review (or as Judith Curry says, ‘pal review’) in climate science.
Well, Eli guesses that means all d words are off the table. Damn. However, on the ethics front how about the fact that after telling Steig that he would not share the information about Eric’s being a reviewer, the smart money would bet that Ryan told Jeff and Steve posthaste?
Oh yeah, that sciency stuff Could use a bunch of that here too Lucia.
SteveF, Ryan’s over-reaction and accusations of malfeasance were ultimately counter productive, as these things usually are.
The sensitivity analysis is the proof in the pudding.
As to Eli’s post, my moneys on Ryan and Jeff being able to stand up to the spot light. Let’s just publish all of the emails, and see what happens.
Hell, Steig can’t even make a comment on his own blog, without having to excise it 30 minutes later. Now that…that is truly classic “scholastic honesty.” A model for all of his students at ewe dub.
Neilson-Gammon’s note to Steve and Jeff was sent as the shock of an 88 page review was roiling the blogosphere. It was an attempt at pre-empting and framing the situation, because by then it was obvious that the identity of Reviewer A would ultimately and inevitably be revealed.
Broccoli knew the stats were suspect, but still had faith that ‘the science was settled’.
I think we should hear more from all concerned: reviewers, editors, reviewees, and hoi, poor overtaxed, polloi.
Transparency, even if by bombs bursting in air.
====================
Alright, someone clever make a flash animation showing O’Donnell’s point, as explicated by the Bish. Then post it on YouTube.
This blaming is obscuring the shaming due that Nature cover. It is a nice refresher in spin-doctoring, but nature is not impressed.
===============
Eli, if you want to be technical, Ryan never told Eric that, nor was it a precondition for Eric divulging the information. I know what he said later was different (and he’s explained why he said that, even though it isn’t manifestly true, his explanation appeared on this blog).
And anyways, “gentleman agreements” end when one side stops being a gentleman.
Regarding the sciencey stuff, nothing personal, but I like the SOD posts better. Less is not more here. At the least, put together a toy model and show how it works.
OTH, I guess ethics of science is still science, but that’s not the same as tribalistic behavior. You and your group haven’t made the case that Lucia is behaving tribalistic to this point (getting your panties in a wad isn’t proof that she’s being tribalistic, not in my book anyway).
Nick (Comment#68853):
I agree that it would be useful for O’Donnell et al to show how their model responds to changes in trends. However, it seems very weak to me to ex post facto explain that which is counterintuitive and unexpected with the equivlent of the wave of the hand.
Bonson steals pony
From the Mongol Horde’s long string.
See how well he rides?
===============
kim:
Perhaps, Broccoli gave too much deference to reviewer A, but ultimately the authors could have done more “push back” than they did (as long as they explain it clearly). Broccoli is supposed to be an impartial judge in a (sometimes) adversarial relationship between author and reviewer. He’s not required to make your arguments for you, when you can’t or don’t, even if he knows the arguments can be made (no hard and fast rule there, just guidelines as far as I know).
SteveF, have you read the paper yet? I think Ryan et al are claiming there are more problems than just the three PCs retained with RegEM being used here.
Sven, the other other part of the take home message is you need look no further than Climate Audit, if you want to understand why there is a divide: They intentionally foment it themselves, which is why I generally ignore their self-aggrandizing tripe.
Boris, the stats speak for themselves. So do thermometers. Sometimes what they say needs aggrandizing.
Yes, my attention rivets not only on the aggrandizing, but who is aggrandizing what, and why.
Plus one for Steve. Quantify, measure, record, reflect. Hmmm, this Nature cover is clearly an outlier. What to do? What to do?
============================
Carrick (Comment#68899) (AKA the man who never sleeps),
“I think Ryan et al are claiming there are more problems than just the three PCs retained with RegEM being used here.”
.
Yes, for sure there are other issues. But the principle issue is (IMO) that the number of PC retained by S(09), three, always leads to an erroneous reconstruction… the peninsular warmth is smeared over much of the rest of the continent. No matter what other choices are made (and there may or may not be perfectly legitimate arguments about those other choices), with only 3 PC’s retained the reconstruction is always going to be very wrong.
Re: Sven (Feb 10 05:13),
> Never write anything in anger.
That should be the main take-home. Adhering to that counsel would have prevented all of O’Donnell’s problems of the past few days, from what I can see. Steig’s situation is more complex. But that unheeded advice would have been good for him, too.
Kim–
It seems to me Broccoli behaved well.
I don’t have any idea what Broccoli knew. As far as I can tell, no one alerted him to the potential conflict of interest on Steig’s part. Steig doesn’t mention doing so; neither do any of the authors of O10. There is no reason to expect Broccoli to be reading blogs to try to notice what appear to me to be alternating snide/conciliatory comments at his blog and others. It might have been wise for Ryan and co authors to do so on the initial submission– but who knows? Maybe not.
The editor is not expected to be a subject matter expert, so he wouldn’t have any reason to discern anything about the statistical methods.
Seems to me that Ryan and coauthors gave a hostile reviewerA the benefit of the doubt intiall, and continued to do so longer than maybe they should have. Then they finally got frustrated and complained. The editor looked into it, likely read the various reviews front matter etc. more closely, deemed O’Donell’s interpretation plausible (though not necessarily)and pulled reviewerA out of the loop.
That’s what an editor is supposed to do.
Boris,
I know…
lucia, I think he’s probably ultimately behaved well. But What’s Up! with having O’Donnell reviewing in the fashion that he did? I read Broccoli’s editorial back then, and his decision about the paper is correct, but he pulled all its punches with the conclusion of his editorial.
The Antarctica of Dorian Rosy.
=====================
Broccoli is not a vegetable. He knew and knows what is going on.
AMac,
“But that unheeded advice would have been good for him, too.”
.
Yes, leavened, perhaps, with a bit of humility.
Bishop Hill asked Liz Wagner at the Committee on Publication Ethics if the author of a paper being critiqued should be a reviewer. Her reply:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/2/10/liz-wager-on-conflicted-peer-review.html
Re: Nick Stokes’ comments on peer review of O’Donnell et al upthread, #68831 & #68841
My first response on reading that was,
“What a bunch of %$#!”But, hey… nothing in anger!And on second thought, I can come up with a number of scenarios where Nick Stokes — who I’ve never met, and don’t know — might indeed find it agreeable to be an aspiring author who is required to deal with a Steig-like series of reviews.
It’s safe to say that most people would find it exceptionally disagreeable and frustrating to be in O’Donnell’s position, trying to respond to critiques such as those that Steig made.
So I can grant that Nick holds his opinion in good faith, while disagreeing with its implications. I can hope that he groks that he’s a special case on this matter. He might, or he might not.
.
My strong overall sense is that this is the sort of mental reasoning that O’Donnell didn’t do, upon reading Steig’s “West Antarctica: still warming” takedown of his paper at RealClimate. He assumed a bunch of things, some of which turned out to be correct, others out-of-context, others wrong. Most of his two posts at ClimateAudit will stand. Some parts, he’ll have to eat humble pie about, retracting or apologizing.
Steig, I’m less sure about. He also comes across as impetuous, but less so. He seems to have used the tools at hand to advance his agenda. Most of his actions are unexceptional for science/academic hardball, but a number of them of them would have left me feeling queasy. But more so than O’Donnell, Steig seems to be buoyed by his team’s cheerleaders. Never apologize, never acknowledge mistakes, never compromise seems to be the spirit that animates his current RC post and its comments section.
My two cents.
Lucia,
I don’t consider the paper sandbagged because 1) the editor clearly thought reviewer A was relevant to the discussion and 2) the paper was published. The editor was ultimately in charge and if you want to claim attempted sandbagging you could, but it was unsuccessful, and since the manuscript was ultimately responsive to much of reviewer A, and even though reviewer A still had issues, the review stated the work was appropriate for publication in the journal in question. Conclusion: not a sandbag. As they say on the internet, mileage may vary.
For those of you who are clamoring for what happens with O(10) when trends are increased in the Peninsula and Byrd there is in RyanO’s first recent post at CA the following:
“Now, what happens to our reconstruction if you add a 0.1 Deg C / decade trend to the Peninsula stations? Our East Antarctic trends go from 0.02 to . . . 0.02. Our West Antarctic trends go from 0.10 to 0.16, with almost all of the increase in Ellsworth Land (adjacent to the Peninsula). And the Peninsula trend goes from 0.35 to 0.45 . . . or the same 0.1 Deg C / decade we added to the Peninsula stations.
And what happens if you add a 0.5 Deg C / decade trend to Byrd? Why, the West Antarctic trend increases 160% from 0.10 to 0.26 Deg C / decade, and the gridded trend at Byrd Station increases to 0.59 Deg C / decade . . . with the East Antarctic trends increasing by a mere 0.01 and the Peninsula trends increasing by 0.03.”
Re: lucia (Feb 10 08:24),
Seems to me that Ryan and coauthors gave a hostile reviewerA the benefit of the doubt intiall, and continued to do so longer than maybe they should have. Then they finally got frustrated and complained.
According to SM, Ryan and co-authors raised concerns about reviewer A after the first review. The fact that Broccoli let Steig go to town as long as he did tells me of a cozy relationship between Broccoli and the Team.
“But more so than O’Donnell, Steig seems to be buoyed by his team’s cheerleaders. Never apologize, never acknowledge mistakes, never compromise seems to be the spirit that animates his current RC post and its comments section.”
I think this is an important difference between many of those who would critique the consensus papers and those who write them. I know that, at least at the margins, and some times more than that, we see differences freely discussed in public amongst those criticizing. The Team, on the other hand, nearly always appears to present a united front in public.
It has been my experience that many married couples that present this public front that all is always hunky dory between them turns out to be a facade simply covering up some very major differences that become apparent only when the divorce proceedings begin. I then tell my wife, who sometimes comments that we should perhaps attempt to emulate their seeming sweetness and family togetherness, see I was right it was too good to be true. And that is often how I think about the “togetherness” at RC.
Re: lucia (Feb 10 08:24),
I disagree. Actually, it seems to me that this peek into the climate-science peer-review process is the major unappreciated story to come out of this blow-up.
The nature of peer-review at Establishment climate-science journals has been one of the great points of contention between pro-AGW-Consensus scientist/advocates and “skeptics/dissenters”. (See, Eli — it’s possible to discuss things without sneering at one side or another.)
Consensus supporters have portrayed climate-sci PR as a successful institution that functions as well in this field as it does in the less-politicized physical sciences.
Dissenters have claimed that it has been co-opted by ideologues to serve a gatekeeping function, easing the passage of certain manuscripts, while placing a series of obstacles in front of those by unfavored authors and those with less alarmism-friendly conclusions.
My conclusion: what the case of Steig 09 and O’Donnnell 10 shows is something in the middle. Peer-review comes across as neither pristine nor defective. (The rest of this comment expands on this theme, so skip to the next one if this isn’t of interest.)
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It seems obvious that editor Broccoli would have chosen a lead author of S09 as one of the reviewers of O10 — who could know the subject better, and who more capable of ferreting out subtle problems? And equally obvious that Broccoli would choose two non-affiliated experts to round out the reviewers’ stable.
The first (and subsequent) reviews of B and C read exactly as a scientifically-literate layperson (i.e. me) hope they would. They are critical and thorough (esp. C), and show that their authors are intimately familiar with the broad subject of O10, and with the current controversies. Both make constructive suggestions, and make clear that the manuscript (MS) is squarely on the path to prompt acceptance.
If PR was irretrievably corrupt, reviews B and C would have looked entirely different. They would have been hatchet jobs — either because Broccoli farmed them out to politicos, or because everybody in the field is infected. Neither can be true.
Broccoli surely knew that Steig would be likely to strenuously object to the publication of a paper that claims his earlier Nature work was grossly in error. He was surely unsurprised by the harsh tone and laundry list of objections in A’s lengthy first review. The conflict-of-interest is not only obvious, it’s what made Steig’s insights valuable in the first place.
Yet Broccoli failed to communicate his thinking, whatever it was, to the manuscript’s authors. All they could do was to pretend that A was a third good-faith, disinterested review, and respond in kind. Which they did.
Which lead, predictably, to A’s second harsh (overall) review with its continued objections. And then to A’s third harsh (overall) review with its continued objections.
Only at that point did Broccoli take a step to break the impasse, by recruiting Reviewer D. Who produced a review like that of Reviewer C — very favorable.
In the end, O’Donnell et al didn’t satisfy Steig’s objections, which IMO would have been impossible: O10’s point is that Steig’s math was wrong, and Reviewer Steig’s point was that Steig was right (which is blogger Steig’s scientific claim, too). O10 got published in a top-tier journal, so the system as implemented by Broccoli worked.
Based on B, C, D, tAV, and O’Donnell’s latest image set, it seems highly likely to me that it will turn out that S09 was wrong and O10 was right. So, again, the PR system is working. Establishment climate science and peer review (e.g. B, C, D, and Broccoli) is not a giant conspiracy.
But: was Broccoli reasonable in implicitly presenting A to the MS authors as “another disinterested reviewer”? No, plainly. In subjecting the O10 authors to two-plus-one rounds of A? IMO, no.
Do MSs favorable to pro-Consensus memes get the same sort of rigorous, exhaustive treatment that O10 received? We can’t tell from this episode, but IMO the answer is very likely to be “No.” The (apparent) defects of S09 is one piece of evidence in that regard. I suspect Nature would be quite embarrassed, were the peer-reviews of S09 to be released to the public.
So does “gatekeeping” still have legs? I think it does — but overall, I think that this skeptic/dissident argument should lose power as a result of this case.
And the “conspiracy” charge should be discredited.
Amac,
Excellent post.
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I would like to add my two-bit theory about ‘conspiracy’.
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Conspiracy is ‘undercover collusion of interests’. In modern day science, ‘interests’ and ‘favored positions’ are emergent entities. They are not necessarily tied to their originators. They can collude, on their own, even when there are no such underlying activities amongst those who hold those ‘interests’.
Such collusion can give rise to the appearance of ‘conspiracy’ where none exist.
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‘Conspiracy’ therefore becomes a bad word to describe this phenomenon, as it is misleading.
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I don’t think the author Ryan O’Donnell actively alluded to motive, though it was difficult for an outside reader to not infer motive, given the charged language.
AMac – What an off bit of logic lapse that was. Not that I don’t agree with some of what you said, in fact most, but the last bit was a logical fallacy.
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To wit – You cannot judge previous gatekeeping antics by looking a singular case. Period. You just smeared warming all over the place, to put it in S(09) terms. You can say everything you said about THIS case, but that does not mean anything about previous cases and it’s where your logic lapsed.
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In my opinion, I think what I’d add to your comments is thus – I think this case says that it was highly likely that such hard gatekeeping was the rule of the land previously. How so? Given that the climate gate emails were still fresh in any editior of a climate science journals mind, it is astonishing to me that this particular editor would even consider keeping reviewer A’s identity secret from the authors on the mere chance of coming across as gatekeeping. I think this whole episode might have come out much differently if not for two things. One, climategate , and two, that the paper was so clearly correct.
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I believe if Ryan’s paper had been less cut and dry and even a little over-reaching =it would never have seen the light of day. Compare that to the last, oh 20-30 team papers that have been touted about that rely almost solely on GCM’s. Talk of overreaching conclusions – Where are the rejected GCM based papers?
lucia,
So what did happen to your comment? I apologize if this has been answered up-thread. I checked over at RC, but after reading through the post on the issue, I felt that another page view from me was more attention than they deserve.
Re: Tamara (Feb 10 10:20),
Lucia’s comment failed moderation (she’s not on RC’s BFF list).
I think a big part of the anger Ryan felt was the post at RC entitled “West Antarctica: Still Warming” in which Steig trys to spin Ryan’s paper, while still ignoring the entire thrust of Ryan’s paper.
Steig is human and doesn’t want to admit he screwed up.
He is still trying to justify his result – which everybody else sees took the actual warming from the peninsula and spread it all over, to West Antarctica and even to the south pole.
So naturally Steig focuses on the positive trend (but much smaller) O’Donnell finds – but ignores the actual thrust of the O’Donnell et al paper, which is that Steig’s much greater trend was not correct, because they made several mistakes (the biggest was not retaining enough PC’s).
It would have been nice if Steig had posted that yes 3 PC’s was too small – and regardless of whether you look at TTLS or iRidge, our result spread the warming from the peninsula all over.
However, Steig et al won’t look at this actual issue, because they are not able to admit they are wrong.
To admit that, would be to admit that, as frequently happens, when you exaggerate the truth (the peninsula is warming) to argue for something that is not happening (the entire antarctic is warming – see my picture it is Orange all over!), science suffers.
The article published in Nature was an advocacy piece pure and simple, and it was based on many false premises, and has been shown to be demonstrably wrong.
Over at RC, Steig said in a comment that he still believes that the facts will vindicate him, when the warming he expects is shown in the future.
Of course, even if the entire antarctic were to warm, this would not vindicate Steig, because it ignores the fact that the warming he thought (or advocated) was really there to-date was never actually there!
Fortunately, we don’t need Steig et al to admit their mistake. Other scientists will replicate Ryan et al’s work and over time the entire climate science community will learn the truth – Steig et al did make a mistake – O’Donnell et al caught it – take away lesson – don’t make this mistake again.
Re: AJ Abrams (Feb 10 10:06),
What I wrote was a reflection of what I see in this case. I think global statements of “what I believe” are less interesting than remarks moored to specific data points. The release of the reviews and correspondence was unusual, and deserves more discussion, I believe.
AMac,
Thanks. Maybe it was all that sarcasm, snark and profanity in her comment. 🙂
Steig has confessed he was reviewer A.
So we see the team in action in real time.
Too bad no one bothered to do a real review of the climategate e-mails.
This latest boorish, unethical behavior exactly fits the pattern exposed in climategate: ruthless, deceptive, untrustworthy, unreliable.
@kim (Comment#68891),
Can you please direct me to Dr. N-G’s role in this?
AMac –
“My conclusion: what the case of Steig 09 and O’Donnnell 10 shows is something in the middle. Peer-review comes across as neither pristine nor defective. (The rest of this comment expands on this theme, so skip to the next one if this isn’t of interest.)”
My conclusion – S(09) and O(10) show clearly that gatekeeping is and even more evident was going on. Some evidence of it was seen in Reviewer A being allowed to stay anonymous, but the bigger evidence is that this paper had as much problem getting published as it did while S(09) got Nature front page and obviously flew through review. Combine that with, as I mentioned above, so many team players papers that aren’t established on anything more than conjecture and model runs seeing the light of day and we get a picture of something surprising.
It wasn’t that the gatekeepers could ever absolutely keep skeptics papers out of publication, it’s that they made it so difficult to do so. The irony is that any skeptic paper is likely to be much more bullet proof. What the gatekeeping IS and WAS is that the team was able to get papers without merit, with serious mathematical and statistical flaws, and based on conjecture published so easily. that is where it is obvious that PR is broke.
Looking away as a reviewer or skimming a paper and giving it a thumbs up is the problem, not what Ryan went through. Hell, IMHO, I’d rather have what Ryan went through happen in every case, then what must have transpired at Nature to have S(09) published to begin with. That is where Judith’s “pal review” process comes to play.
Eli: Do you think for a microsecond that if Mann or Schmidt or Steig or Benested or Santer or Jones happened to find out that McIntyre was a reviewer for one of their papers that the others wouldn’t know that immediately?
The salient point of S09 was that West Antarctica was warming more rapidly than previously thought. The salient point of O10 was that Steig was in error about both the trend and the location, and the warming remains mostly in the peninsula.
Eli instead of doing your usual drive by to stir things up put it out there right now – which paper’s methods do you believe to be more accurate?
Eli Rabett (Comment#68910)
February 10th, 2011 at 8:37 am
Broccoli is not a vegetable. He knew and knows what is going on.
Good job he didn’t call himself ‘carrott’.
Ok,
Upon reading AJ Abrams’ post.
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Maybe Amac put too much of a positive spin on peer-review, and the system and such. “It works”.
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Peer-review has its problems. The present case is an illustration of its problems rather than any virtues. If there is anything positive to infer, it is Steig’s attemtpt to provide a constructive service, even as he occupied the position he was in.
D. Robinson (Comment#68931),
“Eli instead of doing your usual drive by to stir things up put it out there right now – which paper’s methods do you believe to be more accurate?”
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I think asking this question means you like the sound of silence.
With few exceptions, the world of politics has become somewhat boring. So this latest episode of “who shot Sam” has been amusing. I have followed it on WUWT, CA and even tAV, and now here. I have not gone to realclimate (unless a link is posted) as I do not care to write comments to see them deep sixed by someone afraid of the message.
Thanks for keeping us up on the issue!
Both.
Steig started the ball rolling, coming up with the idea of how to join the data sets. O’Donnell improved on it but issues remain, and, in the Hegelian sense we await the reconciliation.
Think about the MSU history. Spencer and Christy came up with a bright idea, but the execution had flaws. Folk started looking at where a problem was when the MSU record became long enough that the divergence from the surface records was obviously significant. The first results from RSS gave us the NRC panel which talked Prabhakara into doing a quick and dirty nadir analysis and today everyone has much more confidence in the two MSU temperature records,and this confidence in the MSU record influenced the design of the AMSU.
You can tell the same story with the multiproxy methods, an initial flawed but useful design, improvement, etc, and we are watching the same thing happen with the Argo floats.
kim, with corr. to #68908 ‘What’s Up! with having Steig reviewing in the fashion that he did?’ That question has been satisfactorily answered by AMac. For AJ @ 68922: Let’s make a case study of certain episodes of error in peer review. Might make a nice book.
For the Bunny and the Broccoli: So which science is settled and which science is not? What? What?
Hunter, he was the associate editor who emailed Jeff and Steve on 12/8/10.
==============
Eli Rabett (Comment#68936) February 10th, 2011 at 11:23 am
“Both.”
A perfect non-answer. If the parallel you draw using the MSU data is serious, then clearly O(10) is more accurate than S(09), unless of course you suggest that the original MSU data treatment is equal in accuracy to the currently accepted one. It seems you just can’t bring yourself to say that though; I can’t say I am shocked by this.
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BTW, I suspect there are not too many issues that remain. No reconstruction based on the approach of S(09) is likely going to improve much on O(10); with the right number of retained PC’s (looks like 7), there is not much more information to be wrung out of the very sparse data set.
Perhaps, Eli, like some others of his POV awaits the official line from the folks at RC. His answer is not untypical of what I hear from some others and says, in effect, I am not discussing details until those trusted scientists give me a lead.
Kim – I’m all for it. Been wanting to put together a book for a while. I guarantee that we’d have a book’s worth or errors, or papers based on GCM forecasting only within an hour or two of looking. Call it ” A Review of Pal Review Publications”
Andrew Revkin on the spat, at NYT’s dot-earth.
Bunny @ 68936
We are nibbling on the same cabbage. Moshe reminds us that he urged joint work two years ago.
===============
Amac @ 68941
Shall I guess what wmar will ask Andy and tell Andy about the settledness of it all?
=================
Eli,
“and we are watching the same thing happen with the Argo floats.”
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I don’t see it that way at all. There were some floats which had hardware failures (pressure sensors IIRC) which caused some data quality problems pre-2005. According to Josh Willis, valid pre-2005 data does still exist, but nobody has ‘taken ownership’ to separate the valid pre-2005 data from the invalid pre-2005 data. I am unaware of any ‘evolution’ in data treatment for ARGO (eg. substantial improvements in methods to calculate OHC). If you can point to a reference which demonstrates this, then I would much appreciate that.
Where?
“Over at RC, Steig said in a comment that he still believes that the facts will vindicate him, when the warming he expects is shown in the future.”
I truly think this comment hits at a larger point and that is the advocacy part of an advocate/scientist who sees the consensus as correct on a AGW and often with some rather dire consequences for future effects. As a result their papers/analysis get to the point, where like Steigs here, that for what they know in their bones they have now provided a correct result and then their brains simply shut down for doing any science related sensitivity testing on their own methods. An alternative explanation would be that they are simply too lazy to do the required sensitivity testing.
“And on second thought, I can come up with a number of scenarios where Nick Stokes — who I’ve never met, and don’t know — might indeed find it agreeable to be an aspiring author who is required to deal with a Steig-like series of reviews.”
Well, I wasn’t imagining scenarios. I have published in JFM, and jumped through all the necessary hoops. And even with a successful outcome, the reviews along the way were less encouraging and helpful than Rev A. Although I didn’t encounter a reviewer who was prepared to write 24 pages to explain what he wanted.
Kenneth – I think the problem with team cheerleaders versus many skeptics, or lukewarmers it thus – They lack the technical knowledge to tackle the issues that Skeptics bring up, thus they must wait for team members to come up with tactics. It’s frustrating because so many times the issues the Team comes up with are either Straw men arguments or red herrings. The follows don’t get this so argue, many times, from a position of honesty (obviously not all).
Contrast this with skeptic followers – Many are highly educated in one the fields that matter – Engineering, mathematics, physics, and statistics and are able to ferret out problems without direction. To the team it must seem like a barrage. Often the skeptic arguments are all over the place because they aren’t all pouring out of a single P.R. firm website and thus many times the same problem is mentioned by many in different ways, or many different issues arise. It’s got to feel like being henpecked to death.
Raypierre now says at Realclimate:
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‘Eric went to a lot of trouble to help make O’Donnel’s paper into a credible scientific contribution…’ (http://bit.ly/gOVXuq)
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So Eric did alter the fundamental character of the paper, by going to a ‘lot of trouble’.
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“I emphasize that I think that a fundamentally reworked version of this manuscript could potentially provide a useful scientific contribution…”
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So after going to a lot of trouble, fiddling with another’s paper, Eric turns around and says at Realclimate:
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1) The paper is flawed (due to the methods he took trouble contributing to)
2) authors could have gone to a different journal or complained to editor if they didn’t like his troubles.
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He sure did a real number on them.
The Rabett’s answer reminds me of the old axiom that ‘losers call for tie’.
Kenneth Fritsch,
Another explanation, that seems more and more likely, is that the team will continue to demonstrate their nobel cause corruption until stopped by either funding cut-off, public humiliation or peer pressure.
Kim,
Thanks. I only got into this latest example of the team’s darkside recently. Do you know a link to his 12/28 e-mail?
On another note – Revkin’s blog here was one of the most disgusting things I have read so far. Talk about taking the teams PR cheer leading to the extreme. I almost wonder if he was told what to write.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/on-edge-pushing-statistics-and-climate-basics/
Re: AMac (Comment#68941) February 10th, 2011
Any specific reactions to Revkin’s post by the way? I am still mulling over Huybers’ characterization that the relevant scientific question is about “optimality of approach.”
I have now plowed through the reviews and responses and find that I disagree with everyone.
First, I don’t see how Pinko Punko and Nick Stokes can honestly believe that Reviewer A’s comments were in good faith. They are a textbook example of moving goalposts – a disingenuous way of trying to kill a paper without ever taking responsibility for doing so. It is an age-old tactic used in many different situations. After requesting two comprehensive re-writes, Reviewer A requires a third full re-write, but somehow emphasizes again that he “…think(s) that it should be published eventually, because it definitey (sic) has the potential to be a solid and oft-cited contribution….” This is just a little too cute. In reading the authors’ response to this third review, you can see the frustration, e.g. “We find it odd that the reviewer would suggest non-publication based on supplementary work, upon which the results and conclusions do not depend.” Indeed! Full credit to the authors for not giving up when other would have thrown in the towel a long time ago. I see where O’Donnell’s anger comes from after having to deal with this abuse of the peer review process and then be blindsided by the Real Climate piece.
Reviewer A seems focused on two main points – confirming the results of Steig 09 and throwing whatever obstacles he can in front of approving the new paper (while continually praising it as deserving publication). We see this theme throughout his comments. For example, in his first review he insists on the removal of the very interesting discussion on Chladni patterns which purports to show a serious and basic error made by Steig 09. He justifies this by saying “The use of eigenvector decompositions to examine the relationship between different climate fields is well established in the literature, and its limitations well known.” So he accepts there may be a error, but it is well known. Throughout, Reviewer A uses wording of the type: “This is one of the most important findings in S09 and it is fully supported by RO10, yet scarcely gets a mention in the paper ” or “most notably that the remarkable rapid warming in spring over mostof Antarctica, as shown by Steig and others is barely mentioned”. Reviewer A seems a little conflicted – he thinks the whole analysis is flawed except the parts that agree with S09 and those need to be highlighted. He seems unwilling to make any concessions that there are any problems with S09.
At the end of the day, Reviewer A continued to virulently argue against publication contra the four authors (naturally), two original reviewers, the editor, and an unprecedented fourth reviewer brought in because of his obstructionism. That should give most people (maybe not Pinko and Nick) some degree of pause.
On the other hand, I also disagree with Amac about the editor. I think it perfectly reasonable for Broccoli to ask the original author to be a reviewer (though we do see a little bit of a double standard in the climate science world to which RossM can attest). I also give him credit for realizing that Reviewer A was not playing by the rules and for ignominiously dumping him from the process. We can quibble about whether he should have done so earlier – certainly by review 2 there were very strong signals about Reviewer A’s agenda. But on the whole, he ensured that Reviewer A’s obstructionism did not win the day.
Re: AMac (Feb 10 09:48),
Amac, that’s a thoughtful look at the process. Some comments:
“Yet Broccoli failed to communicate his thinking”
You’ve explained why Steig was chosen – the fact is that this is common practice, and with more experienced authors an explanation wouldn’t have been necessary. Besides, he’d have to tread carefully around anonymity.
“…continued objections”
I don’t agree that the later reviews were harsh. But they were also converging. The first review was 14 pages, the second 6 and the third 4.
“Only at that point did Broccoli…”
No. R et al complained following the first review. And in response Broccoli brought in Rev D for the second round.
“But: was Broccoli reasonable in implicitly presenting A to the MS authors as “another disinterested reviewerâ€?”
Did he do that? Who are you quoting?
SteveF:
First let me address that—this is the first field I’ve seen (maybe the rest of you have other examples) where the number of PCs sets the threshold for how many to retain. I’ve always used some less arbitrary standard, like the magnitude of the eigenvalue (compared to some estimate of the noise).
Secondly, based on the O10 comments, I would be interesting in what happens with Ryan’s sensitivity analysis with say 7 rather than 3 PCs. Maybe it depends where the error is located (e.g., AVHRR versus ground stations in addition to peninsula versus mainland).
It’s my impression that the regularization used in RegEM doesn’t do a spectacular job of dealing with irregular, sparse spatial sampling. (At the least, that is completely at odds with its original application of infilling missing pixels in image data). I don’t see anywhere that Steig has addressed this issue in his original paper or any of its follow-ups.) So I do think there are reasons for examining it more carefully.
Thanks brid.
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Even the latest post runs the same theme: O’Donnell et al 2010 is useful, but will always be second-in-rung to S09, the greatest.
Tamarra
As far as I am aware, the comment never showed at RC. However the information was eventually provided: Steig is Reviewer A.
Hey, Nick (Feb 10 12:19) —
> “Yet Broccoli failed to communicate his thinkingâ€
> You’ve explained why Steig was chosen…
Yes, I think it was a natural choice, and as you say, common practice. But re: anonymity, surely on the first read of A/1, it was obvious to you that its writer was overwhelmingly likely to be one of S09’s authors? “Anonymity” was the wrong priority, IMO.
> I don’t agree that the later reviews were harsh. But they were also converging.
No they weren’t. A/3 still had major objections to the MS.
> “Only at that point did Broccoli…â€
> No. R et al complained following the first review. And in response Broccoli brought in Rev D for the second round.
Thanks for the correction.
> “But: was Broccoli reasonable in implicitly presenting A to the MS authors as “another disinterested reviewerâ€?â€
> Did he do that? Who are you quoting?
Not a quote, rather, my sense of Broccoli’s 5/10/10 email (PDF) — though on re-read, he’s weaker on this than I had recalled. More like he ignored the issue.
Carrick,
“I’ve always used some less arbitrary standard, like the magnitude of the eigenvalue (compared to some estimate of the noise).”
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You and most everybody else. In simple cases the point where noise overwhelms information is pretty clear as an obvious change in slope in a singular value plot. In the S(09) case, the selection of the correct number of PC’s is maybe not so simple. But the Steig (09) selection of three PC’s seemed to me to fly in the face of every rule of thumb I had ever seen… as I said before, my eye-ball guess, looking at one of Seig’s plots, was maybe 5 or 6; for sure not 3. The sensitivity testing (with added trends in different regions) that Ryan has done is I think a lot more convincing than any hand wave argument about how many PC is right.
“Duplicity” or “dishonesty” are not the words to describe Eric’s behavior (though he is on the verge of dishonesty calling Ryan dishonest as he knows full well that Ryan’s personal accusations were based on lack of information rather than ill will), but “hypocritical” should be a correct description? Both in his latest reply on RC as throughout the review process.
Noticed this posted at RC:
54.Notice: I’m done with this conversation. You can ask all you want about what I ‘really’ meant when I said that O’Donnell’s idea of using ‘iridge’ was a good idea or not, or whether I agree with O’Donnell’s latest commentaries, or whether I’m embarrassed that O’Donnell et al. discovered significant warming in West Antarctica before (oh, wait, after we did), or what I think about Steve McIntyre defining West Antarctica as ‘any place not warming’ and the West Antarctic Ice Divide ice core site is on the Antarctica Peninsula, or whether I think Steve McIntyre actually read the paper he is a co-author on, but I don’t intend to waste my time answering.
Back to science.
None of this to imply that further reasonable discussion of peer review or Antarctic climate isn’t welcome. It very much is. I just won’t be participating much for the forseeable future.
Best wishes to all.
Eric
So does this mean that he is going to ignore questions on even the scientific parts of Ryan’s recent critiques?
LC,
“So does this mean that he is going to ignore questions on even the scientific parts of Ryan’s recent critiques?”
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I’ll take a wild stab at answering this question….. YES!!!
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And I suspect this means he finally looked at Ryan’s sensitivity analysis and said something like “S**t, out paper is wrong!”
Well yes, it’s a tie, just like RSS and Christy and Spencer are a tie. Eli always stood up for Christy and Spencer as the originators of a useful method, so it is not clear why he should not stand up for Steig and yesm, there are still some open questions on O’Donnell.
The moral of the story is don’t cheerlead new and surprising results. There are enough cases when they turn out to be not quite right, but, as the saying goes, very useful, because they open up new lines. Another example which springs to mind is Sander’s results on the absorption cross-section of ClO dimer.
Now if you are asking whether Eli chooses to make a fool of himself by cheerleading like Lucia on Eric Steig’s moral inequalities, or like Steve McIntyre, when he demanded the Yamal data from Keith Briffa when he already had the data from Briffa’s Russian collaborators, why again, the Rabett chooses not to.
SteveF:
It’s unfortunate O10 didn’t include that sensitivity study in their paper. Actually that was one of the legitimate objections to the original paper: The discussion often wasn’t substantiated by more objective means.
Eli,
“The moral of the story is don’t cheerlead new and surprising results”
Like on the cover of Nature you mean?
LC,
It means he is a coward.
Eli,
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Sorry, when you won’t address simple direct questions, it becomes clear it is not worth reading what you write any more. Hasta…
Carrick,
“It’s unfortunate O10 didn’t include that sensitivity study in their paper.”
Yes, I was thinking that last night. In the paper:
part 1: replicate Steig exactly
part 2: sensitivity tests to show that Steig is grossly in error
part 3: explain why he is in error, and show the correct method
Part 4: apply the same sensitivity tests with the correct method, showing near-perfect results.
QED.
.
Oh well, hindsight is always very clear.
SteveF/Carrick– Replicating something exactly is rarely seen as worth occupying the space in a journal. When putting together a paper, one needs to judge the correct balance for putting stuff like that in. Even having it there could distract reviewers who might miss the *new* contribution to knowledge.
It can be a conundrum.
On the other hand, if the idea starts to be argued, suddenly replication becomes “interesting”.
It is true that the idea may be argued afterwards in which case one might wonder why that section wasn’t in the paper. But… would the paper have gotten in with that section? It’s always difficult to say.
SteveF, yes that would be a better structure for the paper.
My hindsight is 20/10, don’t know about yours.
Lucia, they already demonstrate that they can replicate Steig, and they describe his algorithm before/while critiquing it.
The missing part is the sensitivity analysis, and that is one thing that Reviewer A/Steig complained about.
(Other than that, it would be more of a restructuring of the paper, to bring out the salient points: This is something you learn to do with a lot of practice.)
Carrick– Well… and you can keep your restructuring if no reviewer sort of pressuring to modify the structure in a circumstance where it seems that the only way to get your points points out is to re-restructure– right?
Lucia:
If you had good enough reasons (pedagogical in this case), even if a reviewer criticize it, it would probably fly with the editor.
…and that depends a bit on your experience as an author (knowing how the game is played) as well as the luck of the draw as to which things the reviewer notices and criticizes.
I’ll point out that one thing this is a bit unusual here is the apparent continuity of reviewers. I’ve had papers in the past where the second set of reviewers were obviously different people.
Re: SteveF (Feb 10 12:43),
What happens numerically with PC’s is that you have to invert a matrix of corresponding size to get the coefficients. 7 PC’s, 7×7 matrix. Choosing more PC’s can give a better representation, but the matrix becomes more ill-conditioned, so the coefficients are more subject to error.
With 3 PC’s the fit will be stable but stiff. Ryan’s characterisation seems to show this. It’s less responsive to individual points, and when it does respond, the response is smeared.
With more PC’s you’ll get the converse behaviour – more responsive, less smeared, but less stable – more likely to pop up artefacts in different places.
So Ryan’s analysis is only part of the story.
A set of images is worth a thousand words (or a long sequence of numbers).
Nick
As has been mentioned over and over. Ryan’s paper was about Eric’s algorithm failing sensitivity testing, NOT about giving a “better” answer to the question. You and others continually ignoring that fact is clear evidence or “reframing” the argument. Ryan doesn’t, and didn’t have to show what is “correct” only that the way Eric did it isn’t going to give you anything but rubbish.
Personally after looking at what data is there, I don’t think anyone can say anything about the subject of what is going on down there with any accuracy or precision. How about we get more data instead of making it up (infilling)?
Nick:
I understand what you are saying about sensitivity to noise as you increase the number of PCs…this is why I made the comment about comparing the eigenvalues to the noise floor. Ryan did do that analysis too in his paper. He prefers the current method over the older one he abandoned (as I understand it) because he believes it is less sensitive to noise. (That reduced sensitivity may be an artifact of loss of variance , something interesting to look at.)
That said, the main criticism of S09 all along has been that it appeared to smear warming in the peninsula into the mainland. This sensitivity analysis confirms that and should have been part of the paper IMO.
Nick Stokes,
“What happens numerically with PC’s is that you have to invert a matrix of corresponding size to get the coefficients. 7 PC’s, 7×7 matrix. Choosing more PC’s can give a better representation, but the matrix becomes more ill-conditioned, so the coefficients are more subject to error…..” etc etc.
.
Thanks for the basic explanation, Nick, but I quite am familiar with the technical issues. All inverse problems amplify noise and the only way to avoid this is to limit the number of PC’s. Image enhancement with missing pixels and noise added is a good example. And yes, ‘trying too hard’ (too many PC’s) will generate spurious artifacts and degrade the results by adding more noise than signal. Not trying hard enough (eg. S(09), not enough PC’s) will generate results mostly devoid of useful information.
Ryan’s analysis selects the number of PC’s (7) to maximize the information content in the result, just as it should. His sensitivity tests pretty well show that to be the case.
.
When you say “Ryan’s analysis is only part of the story.” I have not a clue what you are suggesting. Perhaps you could explain more clearly.
Just a quick note WRT the latest comments.
.
First, Carrick is correct – I wish we would have included that type of analysis in the original paper. There were a couple of things working against us, though. The main problem we had was length. JoC has a 7,500 word limit unless prior permission was obtained, and we did not ask for that. The paper as published is ~7,490 words, and that’s down from bloating to ~9,500 words in between rewrites. So at each stage, we had to add/cut/rearrange. If I were more experienced an author, I probably could have made it work. Unfortunately, this is my first paper ever as a lead author. The second thing was simply money. We’d gotten a waiver for partial payment, but that waiver obviously didn’t include adding a bunch of additional color figures (we added 2 – but were able to combine some for a net add of 1 – already during the course of the rewrites). Since we were paying this out of our own pockets, finances were somewhat of a concern. The final reason is that I probably lost the forest through the trees a little bit on this, in that we chose to focus quite a bit of time on the regression coefficients (which is the why behind how the S09 reconstruction responds) and neglected to clearly demonstrate the result.
.
Second, the speculations by Nick Stokes and others concerning the PC effects (while not inaccurate in a general sense) are not quite applicable to our reconstructions. The “3” vs. “7” question relates solely to TTLS, not to the number of modes retained in the satellite data. TTLS only uses the spatial component (as it operates only on dispersion matrices, not the original data) for developing the regression coefficients. TTLS is a bit of a different animal than OLS, and changes in the number of retained spatial eigenvectors can give counter-intuitive results. In some cases, decreasing the regularization by increasing the number of modes retained can result in a lower predicted variance. If you split two truly degenerate modes, the regression coefficients can be subject to more error than simply retaining both modes (as the errors between degenerate modes can tend to cancel in the population). This is true of OLS as well, but since truncated OLS includes no information from the truncated (i.e., theoretically, lowest SNR) modes – but TTLS actually does – the problem is made worse.
.
How many satellite eigenvectors to retain is a separate question entirely. Nick’s explanation is most appropriate in this context, which applies to the S09 reconstruction and our E-W reconstruction (where we use 100 – not 7 – PCs). The RLS reconstruction, however, doesn’t use any PCs at all. We simply use Tikhonov regularization to filter the AVHRR covariance matrix after some truncation (all of which is determined by withholding stations one at a time, infilling, doing the RLS reconstruction, and measuring error back to the entirely withheld station). For RLS, we retain somewhere around 98% of the original AVHRR variance – so the regularization is very light. It’s very nearly an OLS regression of the station data against the AVHRR covariance matrix. This doesn’t provide quite the same amount of flexibility as traditional PCA, but still a great deal more than the 3 eigenvector choice of S09.
.
Nick does have a good point in that the less you regularize, the more flexible the solution is likely to be, but the implication (sorry if I am misunderstanding) that more regularization always leads to less error is not accurate. There are three [primary] categories of error in the regularized regressions: the actual [unobserved] error, sampling error, and regularization error. Regularization attempts to minimize the estimate of actual error by balancing the sampling error against the regularization error. So a simple picture that more PCs always leads to more error is inaccurate. More PCs reduces the regularization error and increases the sampling error. The question is at what point does one category of error dominate the other.
SteveF:
Just a note: the amount of noise amplification depends on the ratio of maximum to minimum eigenvalues retained. If that ratio is nearly [or equal to] one (as with e.g., the DFT algorithm), then there is no noise amplification.
For many problems in experimental science, under-determined problems with near-zero eigenvalues are generally avoided. In observational science and in the engineering sciences, it’s not always possible to prespecify the experimental setup to make the measurements ideal in this sense.
(Example: Acoustic localization of sniper fire: If you are using an array mounted on a humvee, you can’t make the humvee larger to make the problem better posed.)
Ryan O (Comment#68991),
.
Thanks for that explanation.
.
“The second thing was simply money. We’d gotten a waiver for partial payment, but that waiver obviously didn’t include adding a bunch of additional color figures (we added 2 – but were able to combine some for a net add of 1 – already during the course of the rewrites).
.
I suspect there are 100 people who read these blogs who would have helped you…. I sure would have! You should not be so shy!
Carrick,
“Acoustic localization of sniper fire: If you are using an array mounted on a humvee, you can’t make the humvee larger to make the problem better posed.” Whoa, interesting example. You worked on this?
Ryan, thanks for the comments and explanation.
Glad I was at least getting part of this right. I’m trying not to say too much here without a clearer understanding of the paper and issues, in case I misrepresent your results. The noise to signal ratio is too high already.
One of your problems was you tried to fit too much into one paper: It’s a common mistake for first-time authors. I’d say there are easily three papers in there.
Also, don’t let money tie up the science here: Get Jeff to get off his butt and put up a tip-jar on his zombie blog. I suspect you’ll get plenty of help with meeting your publication expenses.
SteveF:
Not personally.
The signal processing issues are technical and very interesting to look at for this case. (In addition to issues like the bias in the estimators in the presence of noise, you have a trade off of complexity of the algorithm versus runtime,, because you need the localization algorithm to run in near real time.)
Carrick,
The need to process the data in real time makes sense, since sniper fire tends to be a real-time kind of issue. 😉
Re: SteveF (Feb 10 14:43),
“Perhaps you could explain more clearly.”
Yes. I’m mainly referring to his recent posts. Testing for sensitivity to individual values and smearing means testing for the negatives of few PC. Testing for the non-existence of artefacts – the downside of many PC – is more difficult, but has to be done somehow.
I did a study of this with land station temps a while ago at Moyhu. Somewhat different – the OFs weren’t EOFs – but the tradeoff of resolution vs artefact is similar and fairly clear. I built a fairly satisfactory condition into the code based on that condition number.
Nick Stokes wrote:
“I did a count of these famous 88 pages. In fact, Rev A wrote 24 in total. The rest is the author responses.”
And yet those mathematically challenged moderators on RC said.
[“Response: The length of the reviews did not exceed the length of the paper. The length of O’Donnell’s responses did. Just thought I’d set that record straight.]”
Perhaps Nick might alert his friends than Mannian/Steig statistical methods have not been sufficiently adopted by mainstream mathematics so as to produce the result that 24 is less than 8.
I tried posting these rather innocuous corrections to their misinformation:
“The length of the reviews did not exceed the length of the paper. The length of O’Donnell’s responses did. Just thought I’d set that record straight”
Last I looked 24(review) was greater than 8(paper).
Just setting the record straight.
“So why was Eric not reviewer of the last draft?”
Because he was replaced by the editor. (Just setting the record straight)
********************************
But alas my comments seem to be absorbed by the moderation gods. I guess that just modern inquisitive science as performed by those highly ethical chaps at RC.
harry, the submitted length of the paper (fairer comparison) was 51 pages. Based on my count, the sum of the responses to the reviewer comments was 52 pages.
Another point of clarification:
.
This 88-page thing keeps getting misquoted. If you read the original post on tAV, I said that one reviewer generated 88 pages of review and responses. The number always included both the length of the original reviews and the length necessary to respond to them. The point was not to say that Review A’s page count, in and of itself, was excessive; but rather to say that many of the unsubstantiated claims in Review A resulted in requiring an inordinate amount of response.
The reason it doesn’t give me pause is that I have put papers through the ringer that are simultaneously a complete mess but also very valid contributions to the field. The editor’s job is to rein me in and say when enough is enough, and this is important when the reviewer is really close. The tendency when you are really close is to want the paper to conform to your view of the science, and if there are disagreements, the review process eventually has to come to a conclusion. There is also a desire that when a revision comes in to review that as well, meaning there could easily be the appearance of “moving goalposts” when this is just not the case- as a reviewer you can’t just say “do these x things” and the paper will be acceptable. You give a review but then you see the paper again and more things may occur to you or the revision does not seem satisfactory. Again, the job of the editor is to see where the line is, if there are cases where the reviewer has sunk the teeth in and won’t let go. Unless one wishes to look into peoples’ hearts, nothing about this process seems unfair based on the outcome. The science is moving forward and has been improved.
Nick Stokes
.
“Testing for sensitivity to individual values and smearing means testing for the negatives of few PC. Testing for the non-existence of artefacts – the downside of many PC – is more difficult, but has to be done somehow.”
.
Just to be clear: Do you then agree that the ‘smearing’ of heat from the peninsula to elsewhere (seen in Ryan’s sensitivity tests) clearly demonstrates that S(09) sufferers from this? If so, is this not an obvious ‘artifact’ of the S(09) method? Or maybe we have different definitions of ‘artifact’. Here is mine: An artifact is false or distorted data which results from a measurement process or treatment of the data from a measurement process.
.
I agree that too many PC’s will also introduce artifacts, most often high frequency artifacts (AKA spurious noise). But I don’t see that this kind of artifact should have a different name.
.
With regard to identifying the presence of artifacts due to too many PC’s, my personal experience is limited, but I have seen that it is often useful to try one more or one less PC and see what the resulting solution looks like (increases in high frequency variation… spacial or temporal.. that is unrealistic on physical grounds, for example, always suggests the number of PC’s is more than optimal). I expect there are lots of other methods that may be better.
Carrick,
The submission was double-spaced. The reviews and responses were not. Also, the length of the text of the submission was 31 pages. The remainder were references, tables, and figures. 😉
.
Also, I don’t think saying that Steig was “replaced” is right, either. He submitted his third review. The editor asked us to respond to it and say whether we would make any changes based on it. We said no. Then the editor asked us to update the last sentence in the abstract to be consistent with our text. I also deleted a redundant word on page 30 and properly formatted the MathType equations. Then we resubmitted, and it was accepted.
@Ryan O (Comment#68991):
Do you agree with this (AJ Abrams (Comment#68985)) characterization of your intent in writing your paper:
“Ryan’s paper was about Eric’s algorithm failing sensitivity testing, NOT about giving a “better†answer to the question. You and others continually ignoring that fact is clear evidence or “reframing†the argument.”
I.e., did you see the primary goal of that paper as trying to best represent reality, or is that a “straw man” people are attributing to you, and your primary goal was to debunk Steig’s paper?
I had been operating under the impression that you were trying to advance the science forward, in contrast to some past efforts by others to merely try to refute existing work. My initial take on this was that you were, unlike some of your coauthors, interested in bringing clarity more than contention. Obviously some of the regular commentors here feel that this is a mistaken impression on my part.
Thanks.
I also agree with Steig when he writes that irrespective of the blogorrhea it’s “clear that O’Donnell made several real improvements.” He went on to say, “I said as much in my reviews, and I’ll say it again here: globally, for the satellite era, O’Donnell’s solution may be more accurate.”
Any and all advancements in our understanding of the real world are most welcome, and I’d like to say that I hope that you don’t let your experiences with either perceived friends or adversaries prevent you from attempting to continue to contribute positively.
Ryan:
Good point. I was just trying to be a “fair cop”. 😉
BTW, my record length for a paper is 88 journal pages (number 2 is 28 and number 3 is 21, these were part of a single paper that was split into multiple parts), so I’m not one to talk over much about publication length. (Yes the first one was very special circumstances. I have the same problem even now wanting to fit too much into one paper.)
For what it’s worth, I concur with thingsbreak (and said so much on RC).
Carrick,
.
That’s quite a paper! Your reviewers must have loved you.
.
thingsbreak,
.
Both, and neither. Our intent was first to demonstrate that the S09 method yields results that are significantly – in the statistical sense – affected by artifacts that are inherent to the method. Having shown this, we then described two methods by which many of these problems could be reduced. Using these revised methods, we then calculated results that, objectively, are a better representation of the underlying data. Under the assumption that this data is accurate (which we took largely as a given) then it is more likely that our results are a better representation of the actual temperature history of Antarctica. As such, we feel that our results (as well as the methodological improvements) both contribute to the literature.
.
We do not claim that our results are more accurate, as making that claim requires access to the unknown temperature history of Antarctica. Because of this, all we can say is that, given data sets with similar statistical properties (i.e., SNR, autocorrelation structure, etc.), our method will on average outperform the S09 method.
.
These are statistical questions, and thus have probabilistic answers.
“None of this to imply that further reasonable discussion of peer review or Antarctic climate isn’t welcome. It very much is. I just won’t be participating much for the forseeable future.
Best wishes to all.
Eric”
I find this comment at RC by Steig to be unusual for a scientist. I know that posting at a blog might be a little different than an informal discussion at dinner or over some scotches but when I was managing and working with technical people from basic research to applications engineers they were never hesitant to talk about their fields or what they currently were working on. This was true even with competitors’ technical employees, whom I would met at conferences, being willing to tell me (sometimes too much) about their work.
There are a number of posters here whose exposure to scientists on a day to day basis might be greater than mine was (or who are scientists) and I would ask them what is their experience in scientists wanting to talk about their works? I think that I have seen that hesitancy to talk about their works from other climate scientists that have passed through these blogs. I find that unusual, but it might just be me.
Pinko Punko
I agree with all of this– and it’s why I wanted to know what you meant by sandbagging, which could refer to a range of possible things.
Certainly, in the end the paper was not sandbagged because the reviewer stepped in. So, the outcome worked at the journal itself. I’ve said so myself– but just wasn’t sure if this was your poing.
Mind you, some commenter insist editor didn’t step in soon enough– I’d say that’s a tough call for an editor. As a third party, you can rarely tell if a reviewer really is a person, who in this instance, who could never really be satisfied with what is an objectively reasonable outcome to be certain that they need to take them out of the process. I’m sure Broccoli could not be sure after review 1. After review 2? Don’t know. After 3 he acted.
I also agree with you the editor can’t look into the reviewer’s heart. But for that matter, I’m not sure all reviewers can look into their own heart. In the end, a main point of ODonnell was that Steig made a methodological error. Even now, Steig does not want to come to grips with that.
Even though, above, nick thinks the reviewers were converging because they were getting shorter, all that might be is evidence that there were fewer and fewer tweaks of items that were not central to the paper, and ultimately, the process was going to come to a standstill because the reviewer– whether conscious or unconscious of what lay in his heart was never going to approve of any paper that, when read by specialists, basically revealed the Steig made a methodological error.
Re: SteveF (Feb 10 16:24),
Steve,
What I’m saying is that any method, incl S09 and O10, that projects data onto a space spanned by a finite number of basis functions will exhibit smearing of responses. Similar to the Gibbs effect. Using more PCs may help, but won’t totally remove the smearing, and the problems bob up in other ways too.
I think, and Steig does too, that using more than 3 PCs is probably better here.
Kenneth-
Steig might prefer to make better use of his time. I’d say given the structure of RC, many counterproductive things Steig did and some others did, this is a guy who would be better off communicating with people by email, at conferences and in journal articles and not blog posts or comments.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Feb 10 16:55),
“I find this comment at RC by Steig to be unusual for a scientist.”
It’s unusual for a scientist, on writing a lucid, informative and helpful blog post, to be assailed by posts headed “Eric Steig’s Duplicity”, “The Rod Blagovecich of Science”, “Steig the Shameless”. I find it entirely understandable that he would say “I don’t need any more of this”. Why shouldn’t he?
TB says:
“I also agree with Steig when he writes that irrespective of the blogorrhea it’s “clear that O’Donnell made several real improvements.†He went on to say, “I said as much in my reviews, and I’ll say it again here: globally, for the satellite era, O’Donnell’s solution may be more accurate.†”
Steig says that and then does his post at RC hand waving his way to O(10) getting it wrong on the amount of West Antarctica warming. I really am getting tired of hearing Eric, the magnanimous, making these statements and then practicing the science the way he does and making unsupported implications about the science and authors. Steig can pronounce all he wants but it’s the science that we are interested in. You are not supposed to be selling anything other than ideas.
“It’s unusual for a scientist, on writing a lucid, informative and helpful blog post, to be assailed by posts headed “Eric Steig’s Duplicityâ€, “The Rod Blagovecich of Scienceâ€, “Steig the Shamelessâ€. I find it entirely understandable that he would say “I don’t need any more of thisâ€. Why shouldn’t he?”
Notice,please, that Ryan is still talking science and I believe he was implicated by Steig as not to be trusted and part of the denier crowd. Steig claims he wants to get back to the science. He could certainly limit his discussions to the science that he claims to dearly love. Maybe his hands are tired.
Nick–Had Eric post been helpful and not included gloating stuff like
He there would probably be no big outburst.
This wording would make it appear that unnamed “peer reviewers” must have agreed with Steig’s assessement that things Steig finds unsupportable were unsupportable. But Steig was the precise — and only–person who, acting as peer reviewer found the claims unsupportable. We all now know that — and only know it because of the kerfuffle that erupted as a result of that post.
You may, if you wish characterize that as “helpful”, but I think not. If Steig is going to do that sort of thing, likely he ought not to blog
Re: Nick Stokes (Feb 10 17:10),
> It’s unusual for a scientist…
That’s an if/then statement, IMO. If I agreed with the if, then I’d agree with the then.
Re: AMac (Feb 10 17:25),
Sorry, what’s the “if”?
Nick Stokes (Comment#69025),
“What I’m saying is that any method, incl S09 and O10, that projects data onto a space spanned by a finite number of basis functions will exhibit smearing of responses.’
.
I completely agree with this (eg. a finite Fourier series can’t exactly represent a square wave). The other problems that ‘bob up’… I assume you mean due to too many PC’s…. are also artifacts. The ‘best solution’ is the one that gives the best fidelity; a compromise between too many and too few PC, with a minimum of artifacts.
JCH at RC wrote:
“Interpreting the interpreters: my guy lost badly and took down his garbage, so I’m trying to salvage something, anything, so I’ll try to claim 30 to 40%. Sorry, no way.”
I guess I’d use an independent arbiter to score this one. How about the editor of a well respected climate science journal.
I seem to recall that one of the 2 combatants got their paper approved by the editor and the other combatant was replaced as a reviewer. Now do you get replaced because you are doing a good job? Do you get replaced because you managed the “conflict of interest” well?
Do you get replaced because of the quality and strength of your 24 pages of scientific reasoning?
(To be fair to RC, they did publish my previous post – though they have been know to disappear comments post facto).
thingsbreak
“I had been operating under the impression that you were trying to advance the science forward, in contrast to some past efforts by others to merely try to refute existing work.”
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You appear to draw a distinction that I think does not exist. Sometimes advancing science does involve merely refuting existing work, sometimes not. Refutation of existing work can improve understanding a great deal. I see O(10) as both a partial refutation of S(09) (good idea, but poorly implemented and yielding a far from optimal reconstruction), and at the same time a real advance in understanding.
Nick Stokes (Comment#69028) February 10th, 2011 at 5:10 pm
to be assailed by posts headed “Eric Steig’s Duplicityâ€, “The Rod Blagovecich of Scienceâ€, “Steig the Shamelessâ€. I find it entirely understandable that he would say “I don’t need any more of thisâ€. Why shouldn’t he?
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
A phrase to describe parts of the affair could be “reconnaissance by blogfire”, alluding to a habit among a certain type of millitary unit to unload into the night at anything that moved and work out what\ who it was in the morning.
We have certainly not lacked for people willing to offer speculation at motives on any side.
Ryan O, have you ever read Shakespeare’s Othello?
dorlomin (69047)
“… unload into the night at anything that moved and work out what\ who it was in the morning.”
Strangely enough, it often turns out to be a weasel..
Neven (Comment#69054),
LOL That is very funny.
Neven, did you ever see ‘The Godfather’?
Re: harry (Feb 10 18:04),
“…was replaced as a reviewer…”
Quite untrue. JoC brought in an extra reviewer after the first round in response to a complaint from Ryan. Rev A contributed two more reviews after that. The editor made his final decision after determining that the requirements of Rev A had been met.
It’s hardly surprising that RC rejects such reckless falsehoods.
Yes, though it has been quite some time.
Beware Iago. 🙂
Re: Nick Stokes (Feb 10 19:31),
> The editor made his final decision after determining that the requirements of Rev A had been met.
Do you have a source for that assertion? AFAIK, Steig has made the opposite claim, that his requirements were not met. (Though that’s from memory, I don’t have a source to hand, and Steig’s account may have varied somewhat over time.)
At the PDF you link, editor Broccoli says, “I am satisfied with your response to the latest review from Rev. A.” Not that Reviewer A is satisfied.
.
Anyway, I agree with your broader point. Steig fulfilled his committment as a reviewer, he wasn’t “relieved.” Broccoli was not obliged to follow the any of the recommendations of any of his reviewers.
Re: lucia (Feb 10 17:21),
“This wording would make it appear that unnamed “peer reviewers†must have agreed with Steig’s assessement that things Steig finds unsupportable were unsupportable.”
Quite untrue. He said
“those obviously unsupportable claims found in the original blog posts are absent”
There’s no implication that these claims ever reached the reviewers.
Lucia (Steve McIntyre? Jeff Id?) in the part of Iago.
Eric Steig in the part of Desdemona (!?!)
Ryan O’Donnell in the part of Othello
.
(and Neven in the chorus.)
🙂
Re: AMac (Feb 10 19:43),
“Do you have a source for that assertion?”
Yes, the quote that you gave. I said the editor determined that the requirements had been met. And if you need evidence that he required them to be met (to his satisfaction) it is here.
Hm.
.
Clarity is required here.
.
Steig submitted his third review. The editor asked us to respond by saying whether we would make any changes, and if so . . . what. If not . . . why. We did so. Then the editor recommended a minor change, I corrected a typo and reformatted math, and made the final submission. This is inconsistent with saying Steig was “relieved”.
Nick Stokes,
Yes, the editor determined that they met Reviewer A’s requirements…. by doing nothing more. Easy to agree with that.
Re: Nick Stokes (Feb 10 19:55),
Your phrasing was imprecise, possibly inaccurate. (“The editor made his final decision after determining that the requirements of Rev A had been met.”)
More accurate to say, “The editor determined that his requirements had been met. The editor’s requirements did not include satisfying the conditions set by Reviewer 3 in Review A3.”
Nick
Oh really? No implication? Steig used the the strategy of saying something accurate to convey a false impression. That’s why I used “would make it appear” instead of “he said” in the following:
I didn’t say that the literal interpretation of what he writes is untrue. In the bit of the RC post I quoted, Steig wrote something that would would make many people develop a false impression of the truth. That is: what he wrote would mislead. It often possible to do this by highly selective use of the truth. Some people do it often and are rather adept.
can anyone help point me to the oft referenced promised apology from Mr. Ryan O to Mr. Eric S? I just can’t seem to find it… anyone… anyone… anyone?
Nick and Amac, IMO Dr Broccoli likely had the same reaction that Ryan had after reading reviewer A’s third review….”WTF?”.
–
A previous correspondance between Ryan and Dr. Broccoli made it clear that O10 needed to satisfy “major” revision requests by reviewers as a condition of publication. This correspondance would have made it clear that reviewer A’s ‘insisting’ on replacing Figure 3 (based on TTLS) with the ‘most likely’ (iridge) reconstruction from the SI would constitute a “major” revision request and as such would need to be satisfied as a condition of publication. Of course, Steig’s requirement to replace Figure 3 also necessitated a major rewrite and method change of the manuscript. Then in the third review when reviewer A used the Mann 08 (corrected by Ryan as Mann 07 in his response) citation to argue that O10’s iridge method is biased and needed to be corrected before it can be published….this is the “WTF?” moment. Wouldn’t anyone (including an editor) ask how can you square requiring authors to revise to a particular method on one hand, only to shoot it down with an argument the reviewer obviously knew about at the time of the 2nd review? IMO this is why Broccoli intervened to advise O10 author’s that they were only required to respond to reviewer A’s “major” revision requests without revising.
–
Steig stated the following in his O’Donnellgate post:
–
This statement seems purposely ambiguous. He gives no details at all as to timelnes, what was said in which review, etc. Remember the reviewer A’s second review is where there is ‘insistance’ on the iridge RLS method for figure 3 which would also require a manuscript rewrite. Yet in his post Steig says that it was the authors innovation and he “merely stated it ‘seems’ reasonable.” This is true as the iridge reconstruction was in the second draft SI, but Steig fails to mention that his ‘insistance’ was about elevating ridge regression to the manuscript.
What a sorry episode.
It was questionable from the start whether the appointment of an anonymous reviewer to a paper critiquing the reviewers own work was sensible.
Steig’s own words since have removed all doubt on that.
Re: Layman Lurker (Feb 11 02:20),
> Steig stated the following in his O’Donnellgate post… This statement seems purposely ambiguous.
That observation reaches back to the screenshot in the body of Lucia’s post, of her comment to RealClimate as it was submitted to moderation.
Steig has now closed the O’Donnellgate post’s thread, remarking
To a reader coming to the story fresh, say from a Dot-Earth link, the RC thread appears to contain spirited back-and-forth, with strong arguments aired on all sides in a spirit of open debate. It’s clear that Steig’s positions have the weight of evidence behind them, since dissenters are typically rendered speechless by Steig’s Responses, and by the ripostes of his allies.
This impression is the fruit of the poisoned tree of Bonsai Commentary. Steig’s threads are cultivated through careful gatekeeping (e.g. Lucia’s submission failing moderation), supplemented as needed by trimming of allowed comments so as to further the pre-concieved theme.
RealClimate‘s practices are only somewhat sour, when judged by the Wild West standards of partisan politics. Given the mission that its authors claim — “Climate science from climate scientists” — this posture is lamentable.
It isn’t an issue that a group of devotees gather to promote their chosen agenda — kudos to Drs Schmidt, Mann, Steig, et al for their successes, including attracting a large stable of like-minded readers and commenters.
In my view, the problem has arisen from the endorsement of RealClimate by broad swathes of the pro-AGW-Consensus. Establishment scientists and policy advocates are drawn to this seductive megaphone, purpose-built to spread The Message. This blinds them to the strategy’s Tar Baby risks. Honest intellectuals do not create such conditions for discussion of important matters.
In case someone finds it odd that no one asked this directly:
Would this be:
> Thank you for your candor, and I will not violate the confidence of the review process. […?] I give my word that I will not quote from the reviews. I will only paraphrase.
a correct quote?
Willard–
You seem a bit confused.
I found it odd that no one at RC seemed to be asking Steig if he was reviewer 3. I asked — and took a screenshot of the comment. That comment was disappeared. After I wrote this post, several people tell use that they also asked, and those comments were disappeared.
So, we now know the reason why no one seemed to be asking Steig if he was reviewer 3 was that those questions were censored.
I believe just above that Amac has commented on the effect of this which is that readers who come across the comment thread get a distorted image of conversation, points of view and points made by various people during the discussion. Amac’s words are better than mine:
Of course Steig and authors at RC have a perfect right to try to shape discourse. If their preferred method is the accurate but misleading half-truth, they will find that sometimes works. But it won’t work with everyone– particular those who have access to the other half of the truth, who can see the practice of half-truth prevarication in many forms and who will judge for themselves.
Re: willard (Feb 11 07:50),
> a correct quote?
In his intemperate post at Climate Audit, O’Donnell wrote
That’s entirely consistent with the text you quote. Curiously, I didn’t get Google to return any hits for it.
RyanO seems to follow this thread, in which case he could comment.
For Nick– I thought I would elaborate on the issue of statements being accurate while also misleading. These definitions of various sorts of lies that rely on using true statements come from Wikipedias page discussing the concept of “a Lie”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
“However, even a true statement can be used to deceive. In this situation, it is the intent of being overall untruthful rather than the truthfulness of any individual statement that is considered the lie.”
Further down:
Careful speaking
This section has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.
* It may contain original research or unverifiable claims. Tagged since April 2010.
* Its factual accuracy is disputed. Tagged since April 2010.
Willard’s quote is correct.
Lucia,
.
In case someone finds it odd that no one asked this directly: what was the topic discussed by the post where you were trying to ask the question you found odd no one asked?
.
In case someone finds it odd that no one asked this directly: should we not consider that you took the rhetorical question “Is there really anything else to say?” as a hook to coatrack the question you found it odd that no one asked it directly?
.
In case someone finds it odd that no one asked it directly: should we consider that you were seeking the other half of the truth when you ask this question?
.
And finally, in case someone finds it odd that no one asked it directly: could you give us a timeline of your last posts that mentions Eric Steig that includes this question you found odd that no one asked it directly?
.
Thank you for your concern about my mental states, your rewriting of “Yes, but RC moderation” that you already did earlier, which is related to the question someone could find odd that no one asked directly, and your admission that you are presenting (the other) half-truths,
.
On all my work, my name affirms my Honor.
Re: willard (Feb 11 08:50),
Heh. I always enjoy your remarks, and often learn from them. You and Lucia should be friends (probably not BFFs though).
One follow-up —
> should we not consider that you took the rhetorical question “Is there really anything else to say?†as a hook to coatrack the question you found it odd that no one asked it directly?
The straightforward interpretation of Steig’s response is that it’s bizarre to suppose that he reviewed O10, and/or that it’s bizarre to suppose that such a review recommended replacing TTLS with iridge.
In the event, neither supposition is bizarre. The truth of the latter seems to hinge on the interpretation of “recommend” in the context of peer-review, and on the distinction between main text and supplement. Possibly contentious, but not bizarre.
RyanO–
My point is the quote willard supplied is disconnected from the my comment which willard quoted. I found it odd that there were no comments at RC asking steig whether he was Reviewer A. I think reading the first two comments– Sven’s and mine, makes it clear that I mean in comments at RC, not “no one ever, ever, ever, anywhere” asked directly.
At the time I wrote that, we all knew you had asked directly because you told us. My reading of the answer Steig supplied was that it was unambigious that he was a reviewer, but as Julio pointed out, it left open the glimmer of a possibility that he was Rev. B-D.
Given ambiguity of Steigs response and the various accusations of lieing etc, I found it odd that no one was asking in comments at RC.
Willard seems to have misunderstood this and showed that you had asked directly in an email. That fact is not in dispute. I should think this was clear based on the content of the post above the fold, but evidently Willard did not understand that.
Lucia,
I agree. I was just confirming that it was correct, as AMac had mentioned that my original post was “entirely consistent”. I wasn’t meaning to imply anything. I only meant to inform AMac that, it was not only consistent, it was a correct quote.
John Nielsen-Gammon at Stoat:
“Announcing the identity of the anonymous reviewer was wrong in and of itself. The seriousness of the offense deepens to the extent that the author also reveals some of the content of the review. Revealing the identity of the reviewer while simultaneously publishing the complete content of the reviews makes this particular ethical violation as bad as possible.”
willard-
First thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer so many direct questions. I’ll try to do so fully— to the extent that I understand them.
Sorry for any misunderstanding. I am not suggesting anything particularly wrong with your mental state, only that you seem to be misunderstanding what I meant– and I think what I meant was clear in context. I also think the information you seem to believe omitted is right there available to any reader. So, no, I do not think I am presenting half-truths, and I find it very odd that you seem to read what I wrote as any such admission.
Let me address your question:
When you refer to “the post”, do you mean toto’s comment at RC? I assume you do and will answer based on that understanding.
Addressing Steig, Toto brought up the issue that Steig had recommended iridge over TTLS in “your review” . Steig’s response was [Response: This is the most bizarre thing I’ve heard yet. Is there really anything else to say? — eric]
Based on that response, I think it is unclear whether the “thing” is bizarre because eric was not the reviewer or because, as reviewer, eric didn’t do that.
For those who want to read that comment in full, n my main post, I linked to that specific comment http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/comment-page-2/#comment-199959 which should permit people to find the full contents of the comment. The link appears to send people to the top of the page so they might need to use their browser’s search tool.
I’m not sure what you mean by “coattrack”. If you mean did I ask a question that occurred to me based on eric’s ambiguous response: I did. I wanted to know if the theory was “bizarre” because eric was not the reviewer or for some other reason. If Eric was not the reviewer, the theory would clearly be bizarre– and I could understand why eric would think so and expect others to undertsand his response in context.
I scanned back and could not find any questions or answers to this question. So, I asked him if he was reviewer A directly, in comments at RC.
Does this answer your question about “coatracking”?
I’m not sure what “other half of the truth” you are referring to in this context. I was trying to discover whether Steig was, quite specifically, Reviewer A, which was a piece of the puzzled that was unclear to me at that time.
I might be able to give the time-line you desire if I I understood what elements you wish placed on a timeline. I’ll do the best I can.
First, I assume by “it” you are referring back to the question I expected to find at RC but which I did not find.
I know I specifically said I found it odd that no one had asked in direct response to Sven’s comment. I stated that in my main post as follows:
My thought when I composed these two adjacent sentences was that readers would understand that I was amazed that given all the pople asking Steig questions at RC, no one at RC posted any direct question asking him if he was reviewer A. It appears my failing to repeat at RC may have contributed to you misunderstanding what I meant a bit later.
In the first comment on my thread, Sven seems to refer to the question I was amazed no one asked at RC using the pronound “it”, telling us “I aked it at RC”. My response to Sven appears immediately after Sven’s comment. To save you the trouble of scrolling back. Sven’s comment, and mine observing that it’s odd no one posted the sort of question he asked– I have added bold to highlight the elements of his comment that I though readers might understand in context:
When I used the word “this”, I meant: the question both Sven and I asked at RC. I thought the notion of “at RC” would carry over from Sven’s comment, and also from the fact that “the screenshot” was of a comment at RC. Sorry if my failure to include “at RC” in my response to Sven confused you.
I’m not sure what other elements of the time line confused you. Eventually, my comment did not appear and other people reported theirs asking the same or similar questions did not appear and I no longer found it “odd” that the questions didn’t appear. I knew the reason: comments asking this question were being rejected. I suppose you can go back in the thread and find the very last comment when I said I thought it was odd they didn’t appear and find the time stamp. The information is available to anyone who thinks this question is important.
Your welcome. I hope I was able to clarify!
RyanO,
.
Thank you for your direct answer: so we now know that this is a correct quote, viz.
.
> Thank you for your candor, and I will not violate the confidence of the review process. […?] I give my word that I will not quote from the reviews. I will only paraphrase.
.
just in case someone finds it odd that no one asked this directly, only just.
.
Now, must we presume that you are the author of this quote, viz.:
.
> Thank you for your candor, and I will not violate the confidence of the review process. […?] I give my word that I will not quote from the reviews. I will only paraphrase.
.
in case someone finds it odd that no one asked this directly?
.
I am unaware that you said you were the author of the quote above. In that case, sorry for asking.
.
It would be a pity to presume too much, for we know how speculation can be dangerous.
.
Many thanks!
.
Ex Scientia Intertubes,
.
w
Lucia:
Yep, there are lies of commission (knowingly make a statement that is false with intent to deceive).
And lies of omission (knowingly omit part of the truth with intent to deceive).
People who’ve had formal ethics training get exposed to both of these as being wrong. Most scientists should know that you don’t state partial truths, if you know your audience would be likely to be mislead, and that to do so is an ethical breach.
(Politicians do it all the time of course.)
Pinko Punko,
I think we are in agreement that final result of the peer review system. However, it does not mean that the system worked optimally. I think it fair to say that many other less determined authors would have walked away after the second demand for a full re-write. I disagree with your defense of Reviewer A. The content of his reviews does comport with your hypothetical of ”
You give a review but then you see the paper again and more things may occur to you or the revision does not seem satisfactory.”
Read his third comments again. This is a man who won’t take yes for an answer. He says: “The main issue is that the cross-validation procedures used by O’Donnell et al. in their supplementary infromation (sic) are not valid. Although I mentioned this problem in my last review, O’Donnell et al. have not adequateky (sic) addressed it.”
How can you claim this is good faith? At his suggestion (or at least with his concurrence), the primary results were changed to iridge. The cross validation issues are irrelevant for irridge which Reviewer A even acknowledges. Yet he still requires a re-write based on this issue.
You say that “unless one wishes to look into peoples’ hearts, nothing about this process seems unfair based on the outcome.” That misses the whole point. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science. We can certainly make reasonable judgments on the process given we have a substantial written record.
I know that it seems to mainstream climate scientists / supporters that skeptics are quick to cry wolf about the peer review system. However, from the skeptic side, there seems a pattern that is quite troubling. And it is not just reviewer A’s comments here. Steig brought on as reviewer of O’Donnell et.al. Ok. Schmidt as a reviewer of McKittrick and Nierenberg. Ok. Apparent “team” members as a reviewers of McKittrick et. al. on Santer. Ok. (Despite the reviewers refusing to provide the authors with their actual reviews!). But when Schmidt comments on McKittrick and Michaels, Jones is a reviewer with McKittrick nowhere to be seen (a shame for Schmidt because maybe a more critical review would have picked up his embarrassing mistake about autocorrelation in the residuals). When Wahl and Amman comment on McIntyre and McKittrick, McIntyre is dismissed as a reviewer after one round. Quite a pattern. And all of this buttressed by the snippets gleaned from the Climategate emails.
It is not just skeptics that should be troubled by this.
I think this whole episode shows that it would have been better for everyone to take a breath and step back for a moment after O’Donnell’s first blog post. There was a lot of speculation on the skeptic side — most warranted but some unwarranted — and a lot of skittering about on RC with Dr. Steig trying to CHA.
A week later, we find that O’Donnell, Condon and McIntyre had valid complaints but a lot of people went well beyond that and made comments or assertions they probably shouldn’t have “in the heat of the moment.” It seems to me a complaint to AMS about ethical breaches in Steig’s conduct as a reviewer may be warranted (and he can countercomplain about violation of privacy or some such) — but that has nothing to do with Steig’s prior analysis being flawed.
In summary, Steig’s analysis published so breathlessly by Nature with a cover and timing intended for maximum PR impact was shown to be massively flawed. O’Donnell et al showed another method of processing which eliminates some of those flaws but whose data may need calibration to draw any proper conclusions. I hope JoC gives this the same graphic treatment in refuting the Nature article that the original got — and adding in Bishop Hill’s explanation showing Steig’s invariation problem wouldn’t hurt. In fact, it’d be nice to see O’Donnell’s new pictures and Bishop Hill’s explanation published in Nature as an afterword to Steig ’09 (but I’m not holding my breath).
It seems to me the next step would be to try to separate and calibrate the input data (since there are questions about the data from separate time periods) to see whether a trend can really be detected or not?
Carrick
Steig himself clearly recognizes that ‘misleading’ is a no-no. Or at least one would infer he thinks misleading is a good reason to advise serious revision of text. These are snips from his first review of O’Donnell:
…”creates a highly misleading picture of the differences”
…”Third, the comparison of seasonal reconstructions in S09 and RO10 is highly misleading.”
“This is extremely misleading”
“Problem 3) Discussion of the technical details of what was done in S09 is misleading or incorrect in several instances”
“This is highly misleading because…”
“…are quite misleading.”
“… extremely misleading, giving the reader the false impression”
“Elimination of vague and misleading language”
“Averaging over geographic regions that are both warming and cooling (in the reconstruction) is misleading and should be avoided. To average over all of West Antarctica simply because Steig et al. did so is not a good justification, and obscures the fact that RO10 find comparable or greater warming than S09 over large areas in both East and West Antarctica, even if the preferred reconstructions in RO10 were acceptable.”
Generally, the comparisons showing betwen S09 and RO10 are criticized as wrong they are “misleading”. 🙂
Lucia, it appears that Eric’s definition of “misleading” involves any suggestion of error in S09.
Carrick–
Well.. yes. And this is why I would dispute Nick Stokes repeated suggestion that the reviews were “converging”. It is true that revisions showed the authors willing to totally completely reorganize, rejigger or whatever word you want to change a certain number of things that are supportive of the main point. But it is equally true full “convergence” to a point Eric would find acceptable would result in a paper whose main point could not be read to criticize methodology in Steig and where any quantitative differences between Steig results and those in O’Donnell were obscured.
This is a bit difficult in a paper whose that is explaining a key problem with the methodology in Steig- as require to alert future scientists they should not use that method– and whose results show that use of that methodology did affect numerical results for applications in general, and happened to in this particular instance.
Reviews might get shorter and shorter, but these two positions are distinct and were never going to “converge”. The editor must have seen that, and that’s why he took Steig out of the review process and did not require O’Donnell to make the change recommended in the 3rd review.
Lucia,
.
Thank you for your the one answer you gave me, even if it was an answer for a question I did not ask.
.
In response to your question:
.
> When you refer to “the postâ€, do you mean toto’s comment at RC? I assume you do and will answer based on that understanding.
.
When I used the word “post”, I meant the post, not toto’s comment. Sorry for any misunderstanding I may have caused by using the word “post” when I wanted to refer to RC’s post. Just to be sure, here is the URL of that post:
.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/
.
***
.
This interpretation of the word “post” (i.e. “post” means post) might explain better what I meant by “coatrack”: if your question fails to be relevant to the topic of the post, your question may very well be dismissed with something like:
.
> [Snip. OT.]
.
which could remind us of blog’s editorial policies that seem to be considered acceptable here.
.
***
.
Incidentally, the word “post” also appeared in this question, which I reiterate:
.
> In case someone finds it odd that no one asked it directly: could you give us a timeline of your last posts that mentions Eric Steig that includes this question you found odd that no one asked it directly?
.
The time-line that is the subject of this question refers to the last posts (note the plural) that mentions Eric Steig, around the time you posted your question at RC. I could do-it-myself, but since speculation is dangerous, it would be better if you assure me that all the posts that end with “written by Lucia” are written by you and you alone and that on all your work, your name affirms your honor.
.
***
.
Invoking your thoughts about what I “seem to believe omitted” miscontrues what I was saying, which was to hint at the fact that it makes little pragmatic sense to talk about “those who have access to the other half of the truth”. The expression “those who have access to the other half of the truth” seems to imply that there exist such truth bearers as half-truths that when conjoined gives you whole truths.
.
This metaphor mixing “truth” and “information completeness” would merit due diligence, but would detract us for what matters most. So I prefered to see this as an admission that you are in due fact presenting “the other half of the truth”. That was tongue-in-cheek, but still suffices to doubt that you can seriously claim to present all the information conceivably relevant to the topics you are covering over this blog.
.
***
.
Finally, let us note that clearly prefaced all you said with this judgement:
.
> You seem a bit confused.
.
Claiming “that you are not suggesting anything particularly wrong with your mental state” is simply untrue, however contextual you’d like to interpret that judgement.
.
Many thanks again!
.
PS: Your quotes from my post clearly show that you did not take the time to let me edit properly. By chance, I did not rewrite everything.
Willard-
It appears you were arguing by rhetorical question. That is: You intended your questions not as questions but to make rhetorical points. Believe it or not, this violates my blog policy because that method of arguing is easily misunderstood, and results in a bunch of idiotic deniability.
Generally speaking, the person trying to argue by rhetorical question makes themselves look like an unintelligible idiot. I will refrain from observing any more on that point.
If you merely wish to make the point that my question was not about antarctic warming and might have been snipped for that reason, you can make that. It’s fair enough. Then, I, and others would point out that the comment’s thread is full of comments that do not discuss antarctic warming, many of which preceed mind. This includes toto’s comment with eric’s comment included.
As for the other stuff: I still have no idea what you wish me to put on a timeline. I have no time left– hot date. Bye.:)
Lucia,
.
Thank you for your concern. My questions were not rhetorical. I already know this policy about rhetorical questions.
.
For instance, I did not check your posts before asking. I frequently miss your posts as they are in no incoming feed into my reader. And quite frankly, I thought you could provide me with a timeline.
.
But it’s all good. Here is the timeline since last Saturday:
.
5 February, 2011 (11:13)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/what-gavin-said-gate/
Category: politics
.
7 February, 2011 (10:40)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/bloggie-awards-is-it-secure-this-year/
Category: blogging
.
7 February, 2011 (15:21)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/reviewer-a-rod-blagojevich-of-science/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2011 (12:06)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/steig-the-shameless/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2011 (14:45)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/in-moderation-at-rc-yes-no-whatever/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2010 (15:38)
Lucia’s moderated post at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/
Categories: Arctic and Antarctic; Climate Science; Instrumental Record; Reporting on climate; skeptics
.
***
.
From this timezone, we can notice that a post “written by Lucia” has been written 7 minutes after you commented on RC, entitled:
.
> In Moderation at RC: Yes? No? Whatever?
.
We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 2 hours and 39 minutes after your post entitled:
.
> Steig the Shameless
.
We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 23 hours after a post “written by Lucia” entitled:
.
> Reviewer A = Rod Blagojevich of Science?
.
I can’t comment these posts, as I have not read them. I won’t speculate for now on their content, as speculation is dangerous.
.
***
.
Do I have the correct timeline? This is **not** a rhetorical question: you had some server glitches lately, rewriting the times is not impossible in WordPress, etc.
.
Thanks!
This comment is not getting through since a few hours earlier.
.
I’ll add some content before just to make sure the Worpress widget understands that it’s not spam.
.
***
.
Lucia,
.
Thank you for your concern. My questions were not rhetorical. I already know this policy about rhetorical questions.
.
For instance, I did not check your posts before asking. I frequently miss your posts as they are in no incoming feed into my reader. And quite frankly, I thought you could provide me with a timeline.
.
But it’s all good. Here is the timeline since last Saturday:
.
5 February, 2011 (11:13)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/what-gavin-said-gate/
Category: politics
.
7 February, 2011 (10:40)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/bloggie-awards-is-it-secure-this-year/
Category: blogging
.
7 February, 2011 (15:21)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/reviewer-a-rod-blagojevich-of-science/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2011 (12:06)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/steig-the-shameless/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2011 (14:45)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/in-moderation-at-rc-yes-no-whatever/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2010 (15:38)
Lucia’s moderated post at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/
Categories: Arctic and Antarctic; Climate Science; Instrumental Record; Reporting on climate; skeptics
.
***
.
From this timezone, we can notice that a post “written by Lucia” has been written 7 minutes after you commented on RC, entitled:
.
> In Moderation at RC: Yes? No? Whatever?
.
We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 2 hours and 39 minutes after your post entitled:
.
> Steig the Shameless
.
We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 23 hours after a post “written by Lucia” entitled:
.
> Reviewer A = Rod Blagojevich of Science?
.
I can’t comment these posts, as I have not read them. I won’t speculate for now on their content, as speculation is dangerous.
.
***
.
Do I have the correct timeline? This is **not** a rhetorical question: you had some server glitches lately, rewriting the times is not impossible in WordPress, etc.
.
Thanks!
Willard, since when is being confused a sign of unstable mental state?
You are making a ridiculous argument.
I tried to post this since yesterday night. Moderation: yes, no, whatever?
.
***
.
There must be some computer glitch at Lucia’s, for I can’t post this:
***
Lucia,
.
Thank you for your concern. My questions were not rhetorical. I already know this policy about rhetorical questions.
.
For instance, I did not check your posts before asking. I frequently miss your posts as they are in no incoming feed into my reader. And quite frankly, I thought you could provide me with a timeline.
.
But it’s all good. Here is the timeline since last Saturday:
.
5 February, 2011 (11:13)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/what-gavin-said-gate/
Category: politics
.
7 February, 2011 (10:40)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/bloggie-awards-is-it-secure-this-year/
Category: blogging
.
7 February, 2011 (15:21)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/reviewer-a-rod-blagojevich-of-science/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2011 (12:06)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/steig-the-shameless/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2011 (14:45)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/in-moderation-at-rc-yes-no-whatever/
Category: politics
.
8 February, 2010 (15:38)
Lucia’s moderated post at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/
Categories: Arctic and Antarctic; Climate Science; Instrumental Record; Reporting on climate; skeptics
.
***
.
From this timezone, we can notice that a post “written by Lucia” has been written 7 minutes after you commented on RC, entitled:
.
> In Moderation at RC: Yes? No? Whatever?
.
We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 2 hours and 39 minutes after your post entitled:
.
> Steig the Shameless
.
We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 23 hours after a post “written by Lucia” entitled:
.
> Reviewer A = Rod Blagojevich of Science?
.
I can’t comment these posts, as I have not read them. I won’t speculate for now on their content, as speculation is dangerous.
.
***
.
Do I have the correct timeline? This is **not** a rhetorical question: you had some server glitches lately, rewriting the times is not impossible in WordPress, etc.
.
Thanks!
I’m trying to post this since yesterday:
.
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-steve-and-ryan-knew-and-when-they.html?showComment=1297473195201#c4300343608386208163 .
.
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! and Spam!
.
***
.
Carrick,
.
You claim:
.
> You are making a ridiculous argument.
.
Here is what Wordnet gives me:
.
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=confused
.
To recall a sentence from RyanO in a post that was entitled **Steig’s Duplicity**:
.
> Did you think I wouldn’t check?
.
(To be sure not to confuse anyone: when I say “post”, I mean post.)
.
By chance RyanO did not wrote this rhetorical question here, because he would have infringed this very blog’s policy.
Willard-
Everyone gets a “slowdown” message at times. A plugin forces a wait between comments which can be 2 minutes or up to 15 minutes– the latter when the blog detects comment flooding (possibly from bots.) This problem has been causing memory usage at the server to soar and had crashed the server on several occasions requiring me to reboot. The plugin rounds the message up and adds a minute to the message. If you look through comments, you’ll see Liza was the first to notice the plugin and said it was annoying (which it is). Thought it rarely affects people, a few other people have noticed it; I’ve explained why I use it.
Looking at your messages, I don’t really know why you saw that message though because presumably, you wouldn’t respond to my comment until after I wrote it and that should have given you much more than 15 minutes between your 5:27 pm comment and the one you tried to post. The plugin kicks off IP address. If I knew the IP you were using last night, I could try to see if that IP matched that by some other commenter. Would you like me to check your IPs?
I don’t know why you got the duplicate comment message. Perhaps you had your browser opened and cut and pasted that into the same comment box as your previous comment– which has a little code in it– and WordPress saw the same box clicked. Don’t know. I’m don’t know what wordpress checks to decide to trigger that error, it’s not a plugin and I’m not going in and reading the entire WordPress code to figure it out.
I’d like to broach another matter. You comments are becoming not only confusing, but are formatted in a way that I find difficult to read. In your 5:27 pm post on Saturday, you complained that
Me not take the time to let you edit? In principle you have all the time you require to edit before you hit submit. Most blogs give no time to edit; mine gives you a short time. But people may see your comment before you edit and respond to the first version. That’s a danger.
I’ve discovered you have a blog. This suggests you might know at least a little html. It also means if you wished, you could pre-compose your comments on the admin side of your blog and look at them and then cut and paste into my comment box. So is entirely in your power to make your comments easier to understand and also edit them before submitting. If people misunderstanding your comments or quoting parts you later edited botehrs you, I would suggest you do so.
My comments permit blockquotes, italics etc. Your comments might be easier to understand if you used them to format things. Possibly take the minimum 2 minutes required between comments to read over your comment, format, try to figure out if people will understand whatever point you are trying to make.
It would be nice for you to change your habits to save everyone time and try to make your points directly instead of. I suggest
* Stop asking rhetorical questions whose answers you think will both reveal and prove whatever “point” you are making. There appeared to be four in the comment I answered.
* Stop requesting people perform long apparently pointless task whose point you seem unable to reveal either at the beginning, middle or even near the end of the task. (In fact, always do the first stab yourself before bothering to even bring up the notion of the task. Then, ask questions of clarification– not rhetorical ones.)
* Avoid throwing in odd seemingly meaningless drivel like “On all my work, my name affirms my Honor.”
* Try to organize your comments to make a direct point. That is: In the comment, try to reveal whatever point you think you are making in a clear and direct fashion, and then, if possible bring forward your own evidence and argument for why you think that.
I don’t really have much patience for these weird rhetorical question– homework assigning– willard hopes his point will be “revealed” during the process business. My general policy toward that is to moderate the person who does it. I recently warned I would apply the rule to Dr. Shooshmoon ph.d. and he went off in a huff. I’ll also apply it to you if you continue. So, please try to organize your thoughts instead of doing this weird non-communication thing you seem to like to do.
Willard,
Your comments on this issue are too cryptic for my tastes. They seem to me to be an invitation for the reader to play, “Puzzle out what I am thinking, and why.”
I don’t engage with very many people on these terms (though I am married…) On the internet — none. As illustrated on this and other threads, communication can be quite challenging, even when people try hard to speak clearly and directly.
AMac,
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Analyzing the context of this very blog post might help to shows that communication is never as direct and as clear as you and us all seem to wish.
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My questions relates to this context. They were real questions. That is, I still do not know what would be Lucia’s answers to them.
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Asking to make a point when one has not the information needed to make that point is moot at best.
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I could have formulated my questions in a way to remove any sting to them. I won’t. You can surmise why. She is free to refuse to answer them. I am even providing her of an excuse by refusing to step back.
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The issue is not about rhetorical questions anyway. I still have notes about what is a rhetorical question from the last time I was here. I can list **several** (i.e. five?) rhetorical questions in this very thread that went unchallenged.
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***
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There is one question for which I now have **my** answer. Here is the timeline I was asking for:
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5 February, 2011 (11:13)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/what-gavin-said-gate/
Category: politics
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7 February, 2011 (10:40)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/bloggie-awards-is-it-secure-this-year/
Category: blogging
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7 February, 2011 (15:21)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/reviewer-a-rod-blagojevich-of-science/
Category: politics
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8 February, 2011 (12:06)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/steig-the-shameless/
Category: politics
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8 February, 2011 (14:45)
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/in-moderation-at-rc-yes-no-whatever/
Category: politics
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8 February, 2010 (15:38)
Lucia’s moderated post at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/
Categories: Arctic and Antarctic; Climate Science; Instrumental Record; Reporting on climate; skeptics
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***
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From this timezone, we can notice that a post “written by Lucia” has been written 7 minutes after she commented on RC, entitled:
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> In Moderation at RC: Yes? No? Whatever?
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We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 2 hours and 39 minutes after her post entitled:
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> Steig the Shameless
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We can also notice that this comment at RC has been written 23 hours after a post “written by Lucia” entitled:
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> Reviewer A = Rod Blagojevich of Science?
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I can’t comment these posts, as I have not paid close attention to them, nor the the discussions. I won’t speculate for now on the content of both the posts and the comments therein, as speculation is dangerous.
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***
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I did not check Lucia’s posts before asking. I frequently miss her posts as they are in no incoming feed into my reader.
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Do I have the correct timeline? This is **not** a rhetorical question: there may be some server glitches lately, rewriting the times is not impossible in WordPress, etc.
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We cannot be absolutely, positively sure that my timeline is right until Lucia herself says so, as **we cannot be absolutely, positively sure** that RyanO wrote this:
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> Thank you for your candor, and I will not violate the confidence of the review process. […?] I give my word that I will not quote from the reviews. I will only paraphrase.
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He said this was a correct quote, but he did not said that he wrote this. Nor did he confirmed that it was in an email sent to Eric Steig. Nor if the ellipsis is his or Steig’s.
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I am insisting on being **absolutely and positively sure**, because **speculation can be dangerous**.
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How this last sentence is being formulated, AMac, might explain why Lucia is refusing to answer my questions.
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Thank your for your earlier compliments, AMac, and I will confide to you that sometimes, I thank Providence that you’re there.
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On all my work, my name affirms my Honor, and I mean it.
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Best,
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w
Willard–
I was sufficiently concerned about the issue of your posts vanishing to look into it. This appears to be what happened:
You posted a comment at 2011-02-11 19:04:00 containing 6 links. WP – core (not an add on spam filter) diagnosed this as spam. Because I was out for the evening on a hot date with my husband, there was zero chance I would see this while I was out and release it. It didn’t occur to me to check the spam filter when I got home from my hot date and so I did not discover it.
Many people caught in the spam filter think to use my “contact” page to alert me to the issue. That avoids the possibility of triggering the spam filter again, or getting a “duplicate comment” report, or whatever. It appears this step did not occur to you. That’s ok, but it meant the spam sat in the database along with it’s time stamp.
It’s possible what you did was to try to resubmit the comment immediately. This would have been pointless under any circumstances– the default WP spam filter would have sent it to the spam bin owing to the numerous links. In addition, because you did it quickly, you triggered the “whoa” message asking you to wait. This was triggered because your other comment with a very fresh time stamp was in the spam box.
You likely waited out the 3 minutes, and then tried to resubmit the exact same message. Whatever it is that WP does to detect duplicate message triggered and you got the duplicate message comment because your message matched the one in the spam bin.
When you came back today, your comments appeared. WP sends approved comments to me. I read the comments and responded. Then I had breakfast, came back and visited my web host, did a database search and figured out what happened.
Your comments are now released.
Lucia,
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Thank you for your explanation. I did try to eliminate the http’s. Anyway. I included my post, rephrasing every (well, hopefully) pronouns, in my last response to AMac.
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For now, I’ll do the most sensible thing that has been said so far on this thread:
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> I am going to take a shower now.
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(Hat tip to Shub.)
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Thanks!
Willard–
It is true communication is not always straight forward, but your seem to be particularly difficult to understand.
On your timeline question: I am not going to spend the time verify that you correctly red time stamp timestamps to see if ‘bots hacked into my WP installation, if you misread times or anything else. So, my answer to the specific question you ask is “I don’t know”. (At least now I have some idea what sorts of events you wanted to place on a timeline, where as previously, I did not know. )
I have not refused to answer any questions.
BTW: I have released yet another willard comment containing numerous links from the spam bin. It went there because it contained numerous links. That’s what happens to everyone.
Re: willard (Feb 12 09:29),
> Analyzing the context of this very blog post might help to shows that communication is never as direct and as clear as you and us all seem to wish.
That is as may be. But it wasn’t my point.
My point was that you comment in a cryptic fashion, and that I’m not inclined to decode their meanings — because, if you wished, you could write in a clear and declarative manner.
Other folks like online puzzles, which is fine. Mileage varies.
> **we cannot be absolutely, positively sure** that RyanO wrote this:
Actually, we can be, for the purposes of blogging. O’Donnell said what he said. Would that all participants were as direct as he.
Would that he had held his temper in check, and not acted rashly on incorrect assumptions. Then we’d all be focused more on the science and maths of S’09 and O’10.
I’m curious: Let’s leave aside meta-topics like O’Donnell’s misconduct, Steig’s behavior as a reviewer, RealClimate text-purges, ClimateAudit’s aggressiveness. Just for a minute–after all, I’m not Web Commissar and have no power to enforce my whims.
Of the Pro-AGW Consensus advocacy/science bloggers whose sites you frequent, could you point to one who has engaged in forthright discussion of the implications of O’10 for the methods and conclusions of S’09?
That would include an acknowledgement of the views of C, B, D, and ultimately Broccoli that O’10’s criticisms of S’09 had substantial technical validity. (Or, perhaps, a re-purposing of the WUWT battle cry, peer review is corrupt!?) It would mean rejecting the pleasant but silly notion that both groups’ analyses are correct. If O’10 is substantially right then S’09 is substantially wrong — that’s what has to be grappled with.
I haven’t yet spotted such a post. This episode being seen as a small part of a larger zero-sum game, I don’t expect to.
Lucia:
Your patience with Willard is astonishing – close to that of a Saint. To date, IMHO, Willard has added little but noise and confusion. He has managed to dilute and interrupt what was an interesting dialogue among RyanO, Amac, Nick and you.
It is your blog and your call but my vote would be to give him the “Shoosh” treatment.
bernie/willard–
If willard does not switch to communicating by making his point in clear declarative statements and providing evidence himself, I will moderate him. What will happen is that he will be able to post, I will read the comment and permit to appear if a) I can understand it b) it does not seem to argument by mystery quiz, rhetorical question etc.
But I do like examples of his communication method to be present before I moderate someone.
Carrick (Comment#68867) February 10th, 2011 at 5:18 am
The issue is that Jeff was not saying it was because he said something unfortunate and stupid in the heat of the moment. (Look at the was Steig is now being attacked). It’s because he then said he was having a break to spend more time with his family and that same misinformation was then repeated at that epitome of moral courage and integrity, Climateaudit.
There then follow many posts about what a fine person he is, and how it’s so good that he will spend more time with his family and all. Holden Caulfield would know how to respond to that topic.
He blew his temper, and made an ass of himself. That is not the end of the world, and people are entitled to take a step back, then move on. But he is forgiven, and the truth swept under the carpet. Try being climate scientist, and watch the auditors at work. They don’t just audit your work, they audit every utterance and word that is written, and heaven help you if you ever slip up just the slightest bit, or if you don’t even slip up, but it can be made out that you have.