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Journal Editor Quits, Saying Climate Paper Should Not Have Been Published

September 3, 2011, 2:48 pm

The editor in chief of the journal Remote Sensing resigned on Friday over a controversial paper on climate science that he said was “fundamentally flawed” and should not have been published. In an editorial posted on the open-access journal’s Web site, the editor, Wolfgang Wagner of the Vienna University of Technology, wrote that peer-reviewers of the paper had neglected “to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims” in it.

The paper, by researchers at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, criticized as unreliable the climate models used by mainstream science to predict the progress of global warming. Mainstream scientists attacked the paper after it was published, in July, and Mr. Wagner wrote that he eventually came to agree with them, noting that the paper’s thesis has “already been refuted in open discussions and to some extent also in the literature.” The reviewers had missed that point, he said, probably because they “share some climate-skeptic notions of the authors.”

He resigned “to make clear” that the journal “takes the review process seriously.” One author, Roy W. Spencer, wrote on his Web site in defense of the paper, which has not been retracted. Good analysis of the episode can be found on blogs of Nature and Science.

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  • Guest

    Hmmm. I don’t trust any side of this debate farther than I can throw an anvil. The peer reviewers are probably just as entrenched and poised to profit from one stance, as the rejected article authors, the protesting third parties, and the editor who resigned.

    Bottom line: Peer review won’t reveal the truth to us, even in science. Peers are flawed. Don’t throw peer review processes away necessarily, but don’t act as though a debate can be decided merely by pointing out which side has more peer-reviewed articles (which is like a high school popularity contest.)

  • seejay

    Peer review verifies a consensus of informed and carefully conducted evaluation. If, as appears here, the evaluation was not carefully done, the reviewers and editor bear the blame, as also appears to be the case here.

    Scientific consensus is subject to change when substantial, careful, balanced, research-based evidence and analysis reveals the flaws of that consensus and offers a better, more parsimonious and comprehensive explanation of the issue. Such change is based on care, balance and evidence subject to verification, not on wishful thinking and pre-arranged skewing of data to generate the desired result.

    Accusations that peer reviewers stand to “profit” from their views, such as are voiced by politicians hoping to profit from an anti-scientific and anti-intellectual bias of ill-informed voters, are themselves the crudest form of profit-seeking, where billionaires lavishly fund political views calculated to enrich themselves and put those mouthpieces into positions of power and influence.

  • rgregory

    The editor should have noted the uniqueness of the position the manuscript assumed, and handed it to more reviewers (there are typically two or three on a manuscript) from both sides of the argument. Anytime a unique controversial manuscript is received, it should be a red flag that a more exhaustive review is going to be necessary.

  • manoflamancha

    And moreover, the current generation in Academe do not take reviewing as seriously, and professionally as the older profs. Sloppy reviewing has become the normal state of affairs: ask any Senior Editor.

  • cwinton

    This all strikes me as a bit silly.  Since there seem to be so many willing to point out whatever flaws are present in the paper, why not invite critical reviews and publish one or more of them in the same journal?  I can only assume the journal chose to publish the paper originally because peer review suggested it presented a contrasting point of view worth hearing, especially in questioning climate models being used to support one position or another.  No model, scientific or otherwise is exact, and any model for something as complex as climate incorporates simplifying assumptions to make analysis tractable.  There is a great deal of art to modeling and we tend to model well those things we comprehend best, often to the detriment of those elements of a system we don’t.  Since models can, and have been used to support policy decisions, they should be subject to a healthy dose of skepticism.   Peers apparently thought the paper plowed new ground in this respect.  Perhaps the peer review got it wrong, but I would rather the paper be published, whatever its flaws, than have it squelched because it called into question some premise supported by a preponderance of the involved scientists, a group that includes advocates for big money interests on both sides whose motives are not exactly pure.

  • katisumas

    “Robert Oscar Lopez” have you had any paper peer reviewed?  Has anyone ever asked you to peer review a paper or a book? 

  • http://twitter.com/Executeur Frantz Batoh

    Interesting!

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