I have long talked about the flaws in science because we are dealing 
with human beings but the "big time scientists" on the left looked the 
other way...

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-
flaws-peer-review

Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer reviewA 
close reading of the hacked emails exposes the real process of science, 
its jealousies and tribalism

No apology from IPCC chief Pachauri for glacier fallacy

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the 
everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. 
What makes science special is that data and results that can be 
replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the 
end.

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East 
Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid 
detail.

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate 
scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their 
critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the 
effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific 
merit – and the operation of the UN's top climate body, the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in 
suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad 
science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment 
on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in 
conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.

The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the 
peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals 
are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is 
seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for 
the work.

The papers are normally sent back to the authors for improvement and 
only published when the reviewers give their approval. But the system 
relies on trust, especially if editors send papers to ­reviewers whose 
own work is being criticised in the paper. It also relies on anonymity, 
so reviewers can give candid opinions.

Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged 
that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – 
have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their 
dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific 
clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

Many will see a similar pattern in the emails from UEA's Climatic 
Research Unit, which brutally expose what happens behind the scenes of 
peer review and how a chance meeting at a barbecue years earlier had led 
to one journal editor being suspected of being in the "greenhouse 
sceptics camp".

The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, 
was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical 
reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising 
his work.

Here is how it worked in one case.

A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse 
weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen 
exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a 
remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and 
do scientists interpret it correctly?

In March 2004, Jones wrote to ­Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate 
scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently 
rejected two papers [one for the Journal of ­Geophysical Research and 
one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it 
wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully 
successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".

He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds 
for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was 
probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist ­formerly of the 
University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in 
the journal that year.

Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of 
southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less 
warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.

Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed 
to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding 
sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research 
Letters (GRL) that year.

Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it 
elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the 
difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of 
Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little 
correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that 
conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy 
of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it 
was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not 
revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as 
Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream 
climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also 
have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have 
attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, 
the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian 
data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's 
analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its 
publication.

Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU 
surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the 
result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even 
globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.

Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who 
runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical 
research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in 
December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-
reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately 
placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long 
ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is 
well in scientific peer review.

Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and 
Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for 
Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature 
when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds 
have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature 
record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to 
make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept 
out of the journals.

In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what 
looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an 
editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher 
Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New 
York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required 
extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to ­support Dave 
Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This 
request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both 
independent and anonymous.

Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask 
from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a 
paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this 
paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to 
dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but 
it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical 
deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] 
method is actually better in a practical sense."

Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are 
from a long time ago and the details are not ­terribly fresh in my 
mind."

Jonesdid not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to 
pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh 
criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.

In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer 
submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research. He was angry 
about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that 
couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His 
anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was 
focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by 
the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sally Balunias. The pair 
claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures 
over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past 
temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th 
century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is 
it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, 
they suggested.

Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century 
climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the 
climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and 
George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the 
research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost 
laughable". He said Soon and Balunias made no attempt in the paper to 
show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round 
the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global 
warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not 
demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to 
Guardian requests to discuss the paper.

The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 
2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this 
paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-
reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last 
thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"

But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their 
own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a 
number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and 
Balunias paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the 
Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from 
the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's 
authors.

Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of 
colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, 
Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their 
findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was 
little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm 
periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no 
evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in 
the 20th century.

The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the 
scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in 
particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking 
sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had 
happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for 
not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a 
solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I 
think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-
reviewed journal. ­Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no 
longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to 
consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who 
currently sit on the editorial board."

Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these 
emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical 
views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific 
standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian 
after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, 
particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was 
­letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality 
for the journal."

Naturally de Freitasdefends his actions during the incident. "I was 
never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over 
the Soon and Balunias paper. All accusations against me were fully 
investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to 
be flawless."

But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. They concluded 
that their colleague de Freitas had ignored the anonymous advice of four 
reviewers to reject the paper. There was a revolt. Their chief editor 
von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have 
appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher 
Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other 
board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted 
that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer 
review process. Mann had won his argument.

Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged 
in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations 
by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann 
and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the 
editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a 
track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate 
sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists 
and sceptics.

Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in 
the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under 
fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely 
opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt 
... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no 
outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper 
– a sceptic's paper, at that."

The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, 
Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in 
Climate Research – the Soon and Balunias paper and another he 
­identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the 
Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old 
sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global 
warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line 
"HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers
being in the 
next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – 
even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for 
once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the 
National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had 
recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC 
assessment report, called AR4.

They had considerable power over what went into those chapters, and to 
have ruled them out in such a manner would have been a clear abuse of 
the IPCC process.

Today, neither man attempts to deny that Jones's promise to keep the 
papers out was a serious error of judgment. Trenberth told the Guardian: 
"I had no role in this whatsoever. I did not make and was not complicit 
in that statement of Phil's. I am a veteran of three other IPCC 
assessments. I am well aware that we do not keep any papers out, and 
none were kept out. We assessed everything [though] we cannot possibly 
refer to all literature … Both of the papers referred to were in fact 
cited and discussed in the IPCC."

In an additional statement agreed with Jones, he said: "AR4 was the 
first time Jones was on the writing team of an IPCC assessment. The 
comment was naive and sent before he understood the process."

Some will not be content with that. Jones had been a contributing author 
to IPCC assessment reports for more than a decade and should have been 
aware of the rules.

Climate Research is a fairly minor journal. Not so Geophysical Research 
­Letters, published by the august American ­Geophysical Union (AGU). But 
when it began publishing what Mann, Wigley, Jones and others regarded as 
poor quality sceptical papers, they again responded angrily. GRL 
provided a home for one of a series of papers by McIntyre and McKitrick 
challenging the statistical methods used in the hockey stick analysis. 
When Mann's complaints to the journal were rebuffed, he wrote to 
colleagues in January 2005: "Apparently the contrarians now have an 'in' 
with GRL."

Mann had checked out the editor responsible for overseeingthe papers . a 
Yale chemical engineer called James Saiers, and noted his "prior 
connection" with the same department at the University of Virginia, 
where sceptic Pat Michaels worked.

He added, "we now know" how various other sceptically tinged papers had 
got into GRL.

Wigley appeared to agree. "This is truly awful," he said, suggesting to 
Mann: "If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, 
then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through 
official AGU channels to get him ousted."

A year after the row erupted, in 2006, Saiers gave up the GRL 
post.Sceptics have claimed that this was due to pressure from Wigley, 
Mann and others. Saiers says his three-year term was up. "My departure 
had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me 
sacked," he told the Guardian. "Nor was I censured, as I have seen 
suggested on a blog posting written by McKitrick."

As for Mann's allegation, Saiers does not remember ever talking to 
Michaels "though I did attend a barbecue at his home back in the early 
1990s. Wigley and Mann were too keen to conclude that I was in league 
with the climate-change sceptics. This kerfuffle could have been avoided 
if the parties involved would have done more to control their 
imaginations".

CMPQwk 1.42-21 9999 
Democrats --  The party of death ......

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