Journal editor resigns over 'fundamentally flawed' paper by Roy Spencer
Professor Wolfgang Wagner has stepped down as editor-in-chief of the journal Remote Sensing. The reason for his resignation was his journal's publishing of the paper On the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in Earth's radiant energy balance, by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell, which we examine at http://sks.to/negspencer. Wagner concluded the paper was "fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal".
Some key excerpts from Wagner's editorial:
- I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011, the main author’s personal homepage, the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes, and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News, to name just a few.
- Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.
- The editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors
- The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.
Details of Wagner's resignation have been added to the "Roy Spencer finds negative feedback" rebuttal which has the short URL http://sks.to/negspencer
Posted by John Cook on Saturday, 3 September, 2011
