The Spectator’s “bias and bluster” on Antarctica and Stieg et al.
The cover of this week’s Spectator announces:
“The ice storm: Nicholas Lewis and Matt Ridley expose the bias and bluster behind the latest set of shaky global warming data”.
An accompanying blog from the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson, entitled “Debunking the Antarctica myths” argues that the tale is
“â?¦another powerful, and depressing tale of the woeful state of climate science.”
So what’s going on?
In 2009 Eric Steig and colleagues published a landmark study in Nature which demonstrated that West Antarctica was warming rapidly in winter and spring. Little was previously known about warming in the remote region, because it contains only one temperature station with a substantial historical record. It had previously been thought that only the Antarctic peninsula was warming.
Steig et al’s study was a temperature reconstruction based partly on sparse historical data (for years 1957-1981) and partly on more comprehensive, but less reliable, satellite data (for years 1982-2006). The paper generated a buzz in the climate community but not everyone was impressed.
A team lead by engineer Ryan O’Donnell set out to challenge Steig et al’s methodology and specifically their use of the 1982-2006 data. Their research was published last December in the peer reviewed Journal of Climate. Several climate sceptics revelled in this; Anthony Watts described it as a “blow to Real Climate”, while Steve McIntyre, author of the sceptic blog Climate Audit and a member of O’Donnell’s team, described the paper as “refuting the West Antarctic claims of Steig et al 2009”.
Why Watts and McIntryre made these claims is a slight mystery because O’Donnell et al’ s results supported Steig et al’s findings that there was statistically significant warming in the West Antarctic, although they suggested the warming effect was less intense. O’Donnell himself said, “I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement.” He added, “In my opinion, the Steig reconstruction was quite clever, and the general concept was sound.”
At the beginning of February, however, Steig wrote a blog on the science website Real Climate criticising O’Donnell’s paper. O’Donnell responded with a furious blog on Climate Audit.. The story was picked up by other climate sceptics and commentators. Now the story has made the leap to the mainstream media with coverage in the Spectator.
The various accusations centre around the fact that “Reviewer A” criticised O’Donnell’s eight page paper so extensively that in the end all the correspondence ran to 88 pages and delayed publication by several months – and that that mystery reviewer ultimately turned out to be Steig himself. As Telegraph blogger James Delingpole put it
“Certainly, in no other scientific discipline would a reviewer with such a clear conflict of interest be invited to review a paper whose main purpose was to criticise one he’d written himself.”
Louis Derry, editor of the journal Geochemistry, Geophyiscs, Geosystems, however, commented that
“It is common for a submission that critiques previous work to be sent to the author of the critiqued work for reviewâ?¦.That emphatically does NOT mean the reviewer has veto power. It means that his/her opinion is worth havingâ?¦.The fact that O’Donnell’s paper went through several rounds of review is absolutely unsurprising and unexceptional. Many papers on far less public topics do the same.”
The Spectator story also zeroes in on another accusation levelled at Steig – that he suggested that O’Donnell and his colleagues should switch their mathematical analysis to another method – and subsequently criticised their research for using that very method. Steig, however has categorically denied this.
All of this may be entertaining to some, but what does it say about the science? The Spectator uses O’Donnell’s research to conclude
“So had Antarctica been warming? Mostly not – at least not measurably. The peninsula (2 percent of the continent) shows substantial warming. The rest is patchy: some parts are warming slightly, others cooling slightly. Over the continent as a whole, since 1957, O’Donnell et al found no statistically significant warming trend.”
In coming to this conclusion, however, the Spectator article relies entirely on the O’Donnell research – ignoring the fact that in the 23 month window between the appearance of the two publications, two independent borehole thermometry studies were conducted with the aim of empirically testing Steig’s thesis. One study was published in Geophysical Research Letters and the other presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. Both appeared to confirm Steig’s reconstruction, suggesting his method was more accurate than his critics thought.
In summary, this is ongoing science. Antarctica remains a poorly understood region – and it may be that Nature jumped the gun a bit with their front cover “Antarctic warming: climate reconstructions get to the heart of the matter”. The lack of data for the past 60 years means that temperature reconstructions will always contain an element of doubt. But with Steig and O’Donnell’s contributions, followed up by independent empirical tests, we are getting much closer to a plausible account of climatic trends across the continent.