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To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (664)	9/3/2011 11:01:19 AM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85487

Another comment on the resignation of Wolfgang Wagner by another Pielke. Retraction, Remote Sensing and Due Process The blogosphere is all atwitter over the news that the editor of the journal Remote Sensing has resigned to atone for what he believes to be a failure of his oversight of the journal by allowing what he asserts is a fatally flawed paper by climate skeptics to pass peer review and to be published. The editor explains in an editorial published today that the paper in question "is most likely problematic" with respect to "fundamental methodological errors" and "false claims" and consequently "should therefore not have been published." I am in no position to evaluate the substantive claims of errors and false claims in the paper, but I do agree with the folks over at RetractionWatch who call the resignation "curious" and ask if the editor feels as he does, "why not simply retract it?" In fact, if a paper has "errors" and "false claims" then a journal editor has an obligation to retract a paper (while of course giving the authors proper due process). In this case, the fact that the editor is unwilling or unable to retract the paper suggests that his resignation is probably the best course of action. It is important for the new editor and editorial board of remote sensing to initiate retraction proceedings for the paper in question -- in other words the charges levied by the resigning editor need to be properly adjudicated. This is both in fairness to the authors (and the rest of us observers) but also good for science. If the charges of "error" and "false claims" are upheld the paper should certainly be retracted. If the charges are not upheld then the authors have every right to have such a judgment announced publicly. Absent such an adjudication we are left with climate science played out as political theater in the media and on blogs -- with each side claiming the righteousness of their views, while everyone else just sees the peer review process in climate science getting another black eye. rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com

To: Alastair McIntosh who wrote (664)	9/5/2011 1:58:37 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Respond to of 85487

Not the first time this sort of thing has happened... An earlier 2003 paper by the contrarians W. Soon and S. Baliunas was fallacious, published under an abuse of peer review, and is used as support for incorrectly denying that humans are the cause of recent global warming (see HERE). Denier right-wing politicians (e.g. Senator Inhofe) use the paper to attack climate science with the aim of sabotaging climate negotiations. Although fallacious (see HERE, HERE, and HERE), the paper was accepted for publication by a known contrarian, following which the journal's chief editor and half the editorial board resigned. The publisher subsequently admitted that the conclusions of the paper could not be supported by the evidence and that the journal should have requested appropriate revisions prior to publication. The paper was funded in part by the fossil fuel industry, and both authors at the time were paid consultants for a right-wing think tank. A follow-up paper was published in another journal, whose editor said "I'm following my political agenda" in publishing papers by climate contrarians. An excellent video by Peter Sinclair putting all this into perspective is HERE. climate.uu-uno.org == In 2003 von Storch was appointed as editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Research (having been on the editorial board since 1994), with effect from 1 August 2003, after a controversial article ( Soon and Baliunas 2003 [7]) had raised questions about the decentralised review process (with no editor-in-chief); and the editorial policy of one editor, Chris de Freitas. [8] Von Storch drafted and circulated an editorial on the new regime, reserving for himself the right to censor manuscripts accepted by the editors, but following the publisher's refusal to publish it unless all editors serving on the board endorsed the new policy, von Storch resigned four days before he was due to start his new position. [9] Four other editors later followed. Von Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” [10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Storch