From: Ben Santer To: Tim Osborn Subject: Re: Douglass paper Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:51:32 -0800 Reply-to: santer1@llnl.gov Cc: Phil Jones , Keith Briffa , Tom Wigley Dear Tim, Thanks for the "heads up". As Phil mentioned, I was already aware of this. The Douglass et al. paper was rejected twice before it was finally accepted by IJC. I think this paper is a real embarrassment for the IJC. It has serious scientific flaws. I'm already working on a response. Phil can tell you about some of the other sordid details of Douglass et al. These guys ignored information from radiosonde datasets that did not support their "models are wrong" argument (even though they had these datasets in their possession). Pretty deplorable behaviour... Douglass is the guy who famously concluded (after examining the temperature response to Pinatubo) that the climate system has negative sensitivity. Amazingly, he managed to publish that crap in GRL. Christy sure does manage to pick some brilliant scientific collaborators... With best regards, Ben Tim Osborn wrote: > Hi Ben, > > I guess it's likely that you're aware of the Douglass paper that's just > come out in IJC, but in case you aren't then a reprint is attached. > They are somewhat critical of your 2005 paper, though I recall that some > (most?) of Douglass' previous papers -- and papers that he's tried to > get through the review process -- appear to have serious problems. > > cc Phil & Keith for your interest too! > > Cheers > > Tim > Dr Timothy J Osborn, Academic Fellow > Climatic Research Unit > School of Environmental Sciences > University of East Anglia > Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK > > e-mail: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk > phone: +44 1603 592089 > fax: +44 1603 507784 > web: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/ > sunclock: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm > -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Benjamin D. Santer Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory P.O. Box 808, Mail Stop L-103 Livermore, CA 94550, U.S.A. Tel: (925) 422-2486 FAX: (925) 422-7675 email: santer1@llnl.gov ----------------------------------------------------------------------------