Another warming hockey stick is withdrawn/”put-on-hold” for bad data

One would think that after Climategate, climate scientists would be a little more careful with their “trickery”.

When a supposedly peer reviewed paper in the American Meteorological Society Journal  is withdrawn / “put on hold” after publication when the on-line community (Jean S / Steve McIntyre) find the authors to have cherry picked and improperly “massaged their data, it says 2 things:

1. that the peer review process at the AMS is either incompetent or corrupt (in that it is especially friendly to papers propounding the global warming orthodoxy), and
2. that the “tricks” revealed by Climategate are still being actively used by so-called climate scientists  to support their beliefs

That one of the authors – probably responsible for this cock-up – a Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne, is more an “activist” than a “scientist” does not help matters . Going through the abstracts of her list of publications suggests that she often decides on her conclusions first and then selects data and writes her papers to fit the conclusions. Cherry picking data is bad enough but when it is done because of confirmation bias it is perhaps the most insidious form of scientific misconduct there is.

Interestingly

joellegergis.wordpress.com is no longer available.

The authors have deleted this blog.

The AMS Journal “peers” who reviewed this paper don’t come out of this very well either. But of course they will receive no strictures for a job done badly.

Sources:

Gergis et al “Put on Hold”

American Meteorological Society disappears withdraws Gergis et al paper on proxy temperature reconstruction after post peer review finds fatal flaws

Gergis paper disappears

Another Hockey Stick broken

Tags: American Meteorological Society, Confirmation bias, data manipulation, global warming, hockey stick, hockey stick withdrawn, Joelle Gergis, peer review, Scientific misconduct, Steve McIntyre