(UPDATES*) Blogstorm, and some press: Journal editor resigns after taking “flawed” contrarian paper
On Friday as the long US Labor Day (remember labor? Unions?) weekend began a storm brewed over the resignation of the top editor at the small open -access journal Remote Sensing. He thereby protested his own, or his staff’s, use of a paper one month earlier and authored mostly by the US climate researcher Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama. I first learned of the resignation via a blogpost by hydrologist and climate change activist Peter Gleick. There was no media reaction at the time. So all I did was pass word via a medium I only occasionally use, Twitter.
The paper that triggered the self-firing asserted discovery of a flaw in standard ways to measure the planet’s heat gain due to greenhouse gases. It found reason to think much more of that heat is escaping right back into space, largely over the oceans. KSJtracker posted on it at the time. The post, meaning I, pretty much shrugged. It focussed mostly on the prompt rejection among other scientists of the paper’s thesis – as reported in the majority of immediate dispatches by people I would regard as diligent science journalists – and on the excitement that it met at such greenhouse warming doubt-friendly outlets as Forbes and Fox News. (One must note, however, that doubt-friendly does not mean absolutist about being contrarian. Forbes hosted Gleick’s post on the resignation).
The resignation received a good deal of attention in media, even more in blogs, later Friday and over the weekend. Among the first outlets to hit the webwaves was The Guardian in the UK, where Leo Hickman hurried it out with commendable detail and sourcing. He reports, and links to, the reports at Fox News and Forbes that got the disgraced editor’s blood up, in retrospect. Most focus on the apology by the editor of the journal Remote Sensing, see Grist below. and on his declaration that also culpable were the media that took the paper seriously and, more telling, the excessive pumping it got from the university’s press release.
Perhaps he should have only pointed his finger at himself. I’ll stick with the tone that The Tracker took the first time around. Most media that responded at all responded well. Those outlets that did not do so failed to balance their reports by including reactions from other mainline researchers. Reporters who get a story of this sort – its thesis is obviously extraordinary – and who parrot a university’s press release have failed to report professionally. Don’t go pinning it on the host university when reporters fail to think things through for themselves or who don’t find other experts to help them do it. Sometimes deadline pressure forces even the best reporters to file before they’d rather, but even then the dispatch should be carefully couched as provisional. Such terms as “unconfirmed” or simply declaring that other experts have not been heard from are useful hedges. Not that the university is off the hook in a larger context, now that it is the norm for university press releases to get wide public circulation via numerous aggregation sites. Most of the time they provide decent information if not journalism. But caveat emptor, caveat lector, caveat reportor, and caveat everybody else-or. As for media getting a passing grade, that goes primarily for the elements of media that are this site’s focus, science journalists and their editors. Major outlets that have laid off or never had such staffers, they probably didn’t cover it at all. Most likely, nobody on hand understood the news one way or the other.
* UPDATE 1: An exchange at NASW-Talk, the email discussion site sponsored by the Nat’l Association of Science Writers, has an interesting string on the topic. Here is a Wordfile edited version, with names retained but email addresses and phone numbers removed along with extraneouos coding. It would appear that not many in the biz share my opinion that the university’s public affairs team is not much to blame, on the ethics front, for misleading reporters or the public.
More News Stories:
- Telegraph – James Delingpole : Obscure editor resigns form minor journal: why you should care ; Delingpole is so contrarian in stance that he probably thinks the Heartland Institute is a moderate voice of dispassionate reason. All that, yet he writes so very entertainingly, wittily, smoothly, and well.
- ABC (Australia) Stephan Lewandowsky: Climate sceptic science: read with caution ;
- ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr: Journal Editor Resigns Over Contrarian Climate Paper ; Kerr raises succinctly a key point – the journal where the Spencer paper appeared has a readership and editorial board largely comprising specialists in the technical challenges of remote sensing – but not many authorities on climate change as a science.
- BBC – Richard Black: Journal editor resigns over ‘problematic’ climate paper ; Works his way through the issues nicely – and ends with a topic so dicey most reporters would cringe and turn away. He lists forthrightly Spencer’s affiliations with the George C. Marshall institute – a right-wing think-tank,and that’s simple enough. But more daringly he includes Spencer’s association with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, “an evangelical Christian organization” that also happens to oppose strong legislation to curb climate change because it would expand gov’t and cost jobs. Most reporters avoid bringing up a person’s religion as a caveat to their secular behavior. Black handles it pretty well.
- Ars Technica- John Timmer: Editor who published controversial climate paper resigns, blasts media ;
- Huffington Post – Bob Ward: Climate Change ‘Sceptics’ Exploit Weaknesses in Journal Review Processes ; Is HP at news outlet, or blog sitet? Dunno. For-sure blog posts are next…
Blog Posts:
- Yale Forum on Climate, Media – Keith Kloor: Editor’s Apologetic Resignation Blows Gaing Hole in Over-Hyped Media Story ; Nice touch – inclusion, with link – of a formal rebuttal of the offending paper, now in press.
- Real Climate – Gavin Schmidt: Resignations, retractions and the process of science ;
- Climate Science – Roger Pielke Sr: Comments on the Dessler 2011 GRL Paper …: Pielke Sr. as is his habit takes potshots at all involved. He favors the publication of the original Spencer paper, thinks the journal editor needn’t have resigned, and that the counter-paper now in press at Geophysical Research Letters ought to have been in Remote Sensing where this all started.
- Roger Pielke Jr.: Retraction, Remote Sensing and Due Process ;
- Nature Newsblog – Richard Monastersky: Cool climate paper sinks journal editor ;
- Retraction Watch – Ivan Oransky: Editor of Remote Sensng resigns over controversial climate paper, co-author stands by it ; This is not the only, but is the most apt place, to ask “If Wagner (the editor who fired himself) feels he published the article in error, why not simply retract it? Was it really necessary to fall on his sword…?”
- *UPDATE 2 - Dot Earth/NYT – Andrew C. Revkin: A Reality Check on Clouds and Climate ;
Grist for the Mill: Original paper ; Editor’s resignation editorial ;
- Charlie Petit
