Blunt Challenge To Lindzen GRL Paper: "(Appears) Authors Contrived To Get Answer They Got" - NYT

[hatrack]

Richard Lindzen, the meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology best known for his longstanding rejection of research pointing to dangerous climate disruption from human-generated greenhouse gases, has been bluntly challenged over a popular paper in Geophysical Research Letters last year that he co-wrote with post-doctoral researcher Yong-Sang Choi. The paper, assessing tropical sea surface temperatures in relation to flows of energy into and out of the atmosphere, asserted that the climate system was far less sensitive to human actions than the predominant view had it.

In a followup paper accepted for publication in the same journal that examines the same question using the same sea-temperature data sets, four scientists say the Lindzen-Choi conclusions are “seriously in error.” When one flaw is fixed, they say, the analysis produces a much warmer estimate of future climate. But the result gets hotter still, they add, if an objective method is used to select the sea data in place of the choices made by the M.I.T. team.

Three of the authors of the new paper, John Fasullo, Kevin Trenberth and Chris O’Dell, have posted a guest commentary on Realclimate.org elaborating on the issues raised by their analysis. There’s more background provided in a separate analysis by Gavin Schmidt on Realclimate.org.

In a telephone interview today, Dr. Trenberth told me that the flaws in the Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got.”

EDIT

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/a-rebuttal-to-a-cool-climate-paper/

[enlightenment]

1. Doesn't this journal do peer review before publication?

Odd that this team got faulty data through not once, but twice.

[jpak]

2. This is old news - Lindzen's Adaptive Iris paper was refuted by researchers years ago

One group used Lindzen's own data set and the other used independent methods and data.

Lindzen has little credibility left in the earth science field...