John Christy and I submitted a comment on the Hansen et al. 2005 paper entitled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications” (subscription required). Unfortunately, Science chose to reject it based on the response from Jim Hansen and the two reviews. While we agree on the value of using ocean heat storage changes to diagnosis the radiative imbalance of the climate system, as was published in 2003 (Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335; ), our concern regarding their Science paper remains.
The rejection of the comment raises the issue of balanced dissemination of alternate perspectives on science issues. In contrast to an original article, comments on papers should normally be published, so that the community can discuss and debate the issue. Otherwise, two reviewers and the Editor of the journal (in this case Science) decide on whether the community will have the opportunity to view another perspective. In this case, Science rejected to present our Comment.
During my tenure as Co-Chief Editor of the Monthly Weather Review and Co-Chief Editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Science, we would not reject comments on papers that are contributed by scientists working in a related research area. Whether or not you agree with the issues we raised in our comment, it should have appeared in the journal where the original paper was published.
View the rejected comment (PDF)
View Hansen’s response (PDF)
View the Science reviewers’ responses (PDF)
You seem to be writing as though you had a right to be published in Science, and… this is just wrong. If you get reviewers coming back with “The exchange is not worthy of publication. In fact, I do not understand why P&C even wrote their piece in the first place…” then there is no chance of it getting in. Science, I would be fairly sure, gets an awful lot of comments and it can’t publish them all.
Comment by William Connolley — August 2, 2005 @ 5:17 pm
I wondered about the Hansen paper at a different level. Is the solar flux even known to 0.85 W/m^2? Seems awfully precise to me. For example, the ACRIM satellite, http://www.acrim.com/, shows short and long term variation of the order of 2 W/m^2. How can you measure an imbalance when you don’t know the input that well?
Paul–
Comment by Paul — August 2, 2005 @ 6:33 pm
A useful discussion of our August 2 blog on the rejected Pielke and Christy comment on the Hansen et al Science paper can be found at http://mustelid.blogspot.com/. Here is an excerpt from it
“Browsing, Pielke and Christy Comment on Hansen et al. Science paper entitled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.” caught my eye. In it, they complain that Science won’t publish their comment. Well, tough, I say: Science doesn’t publish a lot of things. And when you get reviews back like:
‘The exchange is not worthy of publication. In fact, I do not understand why P&C even wrote their piece in the first place. They continually destroy whatever point they had in mind by noting Hansen ‘did it right’… None of the participants in this pathetic exchange seem to have the slightest clue about the large decadal noise that exists in the oceans and some ocean models.’
then you’re not going to get published. Thats ferocious stuff (there’s another review, which is also highly critical, though more measured).”
My reply here is that the above paragraph has no scientific substance, and helps make our point about the arbitrariness of the Science decision. The challenge of reproducing interannual and multidecadal variations in heat content was discussed in my paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-247.pdf). Reproduced from that paper, I state (with respect to earlier papers by Barnett et al and Levitus et al,
“The model values of Barnett et al (2001) and Levitus et al (2001) are close to the long-term value. However, the large decadal variability in the observations should raise concerns as to whether the models and observations agree over this time period for the right reasons.”
This large variability over time is illustrated in our Figure 2 of that paper.
I reiterate, that a comment on a paper is distinct from a submitted article. We, and other scientists, should be able to present alternative perspectives on an issue to the professional community, rather than allowing two anonymous referees to decide its fate. The Monthly Weather Review and the Journal of Atmospheric Science permitted the open debate of science issues. Our experience is that Science magazine does not.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 3, 2005 @ 9:40 am
Paul-this is a very good question. We cannot directly measure the long term global radiative imbalance from a satellite perspective. This is why monitoring the long term changes in the ocean heat storage is so useful. It provides a large scale, multiyear integration of the heat change in Joules, as I recommended in http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-247.pdf. I am glad that Hansen et al, Barnett et al and Levitus et al, in their recent papers, chose to express their results in terms of a radiative imbalance, even though they did not acknowledge that I recommended this approach in my earlier Bulletin of the American Meterological Society paper.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 3, 2005 @ 11:28 am
I must say I am rather shocked by the Science Referee’s responses to your comment. The first seemed like a relatively balanced technical critique, but the second was a completely non-technical, vitriolic response by someone who writes as if they have a personal vendetta. I’ve heard this paper referred to as the “smoking gun” of anthropogenically forced climate change, and to discover that such a title was awarded to a paper whose criticisms were dismissed without fair review, especially in a publication such as Science, is frankly rather disturbing.
I wish the best of luck to you in getting your voice heard, as it seems nowadays that taking a cautionary approach to climate change is becoming an increasingly unpopular standpoint, and I find it rather sad that legitimate scientific inquiry is being reduced to little more than a popularity contest.
Comment by William Brinkley — August 3, 2005 @ 1:31 pm
Roger- Seems to me that it is only practical that anything going into the printed version of a high-volume journal has to be vetted by peer review. You got your review and the comment didn’t stand (although I think the second review was unprofessional, and as an editor for Ecological Applications, I would not have relied on such a review to make my decision, nor would I have sent it to the author). So I don’t see that Science unfairly suppressed your comment, rather, it did so fairly and by the standards of the peer-review system.
That said, I think it would be valuable for the broader scientific community to see to your comment and be able to respond to it and hash out the issues openly, as is happening in this forum. Unfortunately, it has devolved into a discussion of the editorial practices of Science, rather than a discussion of the merits of the Hanson article and your and Christy’s objections to it.
Here is the solution: wouldn’t it be fantastic if Science (and Nature and other high-profile journals) hosted this process on its web site in blog form? That would solve the openness issue and get the science vetted. I suspect we will move in that direction in the future; I hope so. Wickapedia has shown how well “open peer review” can work.
Comment by Jay Gulledge — August 4, 2005 @ 9:43 pm
I have read the Pielke and Christy blog page as well as Hanson’s article and response. Frankly I would have rejected the Pielke and Christy response as well — it is clear from Hanson’s paper and his itemized response to each concern that the issues raised by Pielke and Christy are not particularly substantive and do not help explain the paper or provide any new information. I am shocked and somewhat dismayed that someone of Pielke’s experience would not realize this after reading Hanson’s response, even if he did not understand it from the initial paper. Mostly I am saddened that Pielke and Christy are spending time quibbling about the Hanson paper at a time when it is clear that both natural and social scientist must join together to mitigate global change, particularly climate change. I hope Pielke and Christy will put their energies to something more productive, something likely to move us closer to solving the world’s problems.
Comment by C. Susan Weiler — August 5, 2005 @ 10:50 am
Pretty clearly #2 would not have published the Hansen article either. He thinks that the noise in the ocean data and ocean models precludes saying anything informative. He or she did say something “scientific”, ie that in his or her judgement neither side Pielke/Christy or Hansen/Willis has a clue about oceans. It would not surprise me if something to that effect appeared as a letter in Science.
Comment by Eli Rabett — August 6, 2005 @ 10:04 pm
Jay- your suggestion that Science and Nature should have a blog for comments is an excellent idea. This is a particularly important approach for these journals as they recognize they can only publish a small percentage of the submitted papers. Such an ability to select what they publish is, indeed, a form of cherrypicking which would be somewhat more limited if they hosted blogs.
The problem is not as acute with professional journals such as sponsored by the American Meterological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union as the publication process is more inclusive. In my experience as Chief Editor for the AMS, all comments by scientists were accepted (which is the type of submission that John Christy and I provided on the Hansen et al paper), while all articles that passed peer review were published. There could still be cherrypicking of referees,of course, but the problem is not as serious.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 8, 2005 @ 12:25 pm
Susan-I agree there is a need to provide recommendations to respond to the diversity of environmental and societal problems that humanity faces, including climate. Please see Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2004: Discussion Forum: How Good are Climate Projections? IGBP Newsletter, 59, 16-19. http://www.igbp.kva.se//uploads/NL_59.pdf as to my recommended approach. A more detailed presentation of this view is in Chapter 5 of Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system. Springer, Berlin, Global Change - The IGBP Series, 566 pp, and a new paper will appear on this subject shortly in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (and I will write a blog on this when it does).
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 8, 2005 @ 11:05 pm
Great article!!
Comment by Jessica — August 9, 2005 @ 3:39 pm
It seems to me that Hansen and all the modelers are ignoring observations that show that solar insolation at the Earth’s surface has increased dramatically in recent years. The papers by Palle et al., Pinker et al., Wielicki et al., and Wild et al. show that these insolation increases are roughly ten times larger than the corresponding insolation changes attributable to greenhouse gases. It seems to me that these observations invalidate the models. The solar insolation increases provide a better explanation for ocean warming than do GHGs. It would also explain why you get greater temperature increases at the surface compared to the mid-troposphere, an observation the models fail to capture. The models do not include this measured forcing and no one has invalidated these diverse observations.
An alternative theory for climate would be one that has a very low sensitivity to radiative forcing allowing wide natural swings in cloud cover. Palle et al. show that as soon as the trend in lunar reflectance changes, the Earth’s temperature changes indicating both a fast response time to forcing and a low climate sensitivity.
Perhaps if Pielke had taken an approach of elaborating on the above findings, a letter to Science would be accepted. After all, the previous papers did appear in Science.
References:
Palle, E., P. R. Goode, P. Montanes-Rodriguez, and S.E. Koonin, 2004. Changes in Earth’s reflectance over the last two decades. Science, 304, 1299.
Pinker, R.T., et al., 2005. Do satellites detect trends in surface solar radiation? Science, 308, 850-854.
Wielicki, B., et al., 2005. Changes in Earth’s albedo measured by satellite. Science, 308, 825.
Wild, W., et al., 2005. From dimming to brightening: decadal changes in solar radiation at Earth’s surface. Science, 308, 847-850.
Comment by Douglas Hoyt — August 13, 2005 @ 10:36 am
Fred Singer says Infrared Radiation (including GH radiation)cannot penetrate water beyond 0.01 mm - do you accept this and how does this affect ocean warming in climate models?
Comment by Paul Biggs — October 10, 2005 @ 10:51 am
Paul- Infrared radiation also does not penetrate into the ground, yet it is an integral component of the surface energy budget. To assess the heat into and out of the oceans, we need to consider each component of the radiation budget, including turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes, solar radiation (short wave), as well as upward and downward infrared (long wave) radiation.
My discussion of September 25 2005 entitled “Is global warming spatially complex” describes how the available ocean data presents a complex spatial pattern of warming and cooling that must be accurately simulated by the climate models. An accurate, spatially resolved surface energy budget, of which the infrared radiative fluxes are a component, must be part of these models over both land and the oceans.
The climate models must be able to skillfully predict this spatial pattern.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — October 10, 2005 @ 1:28 pm