Comments 1 to 20:

1. nigelj at 07:16 AM on 18 October, 2017

   Great detective work. Plagiarising would get your university essay failed.

   The consistent changing of just a few words sure looks like it might be an organised and deliberate pattern. For whatever reason I "couldnt possibly say".

   The abstract of the F13 paper does indeed look like an excuse to sneak various myths into a so called research paper. It looks like a tasty gish gallop of debunked things to cause as much doubt as possible by careful word choice and subtle implication. Its not healthy upfront science, its a form of word play and unspoken communication by hitting hot buttons in the intended audience.

   I don't know on what basis they would say Greenland is  representative of the entire northern hemisphere. Looks like an empty assertion, unless they explain better somewhere else. I know this jumps the gun away from the copy and paste issue, but it jumped out and I will forget if I don't mention it now.

   I also don't understand their ideas about global warming being related to partial pressure of gases in some sort of bicycle pump affect. Its true P/T = C for a given body of gas, even I remember  stuff from chemistry class a million years ago, but nobody has been able to show where this additional pressure is coming from, to cause an actual increase in temperature. I certainly dont see any evidence from quantities of added gases, or changes in flow of masses of air bodies. Smells like pseudoscience to me.

   I look forward to your in depth look at this side of things.

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2. Bob Loblaw at 09:46 AM on 18 October, 2017

   What nigelj said about plagiarism.

   As for the bit about partial pressures affecting warming - it is probably part of the Sky-Dragon-class physics that says the whole atmospheric temperature profile is due to pressure heating (or something like that - I can't do justice to an idea that is that far from reality). There is a recent post on the subject over at And Then There's Physics.

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3. Derek at 05:29 AM on 19 October, 2017

   Out of curiosity, what are the advantages and disadvantages to writing a rebuttal paper when shoddy science is used in the denier literature?   I realize this is a slightly different case since it involves plagarism, but I hope you all don't mind because it is something I've wondered for awhile.

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4. Eclectic at 08:32 AM on 19 October, 2017

   Derek, your question may be a little premature.   Let's see more on the details of that paper.   Valid "denier literature" is rarer than rocking-horse poo.   But anything which shows even a degree of verisimilitude, is like a sticking-up nail that ought to be hammered down.  (Unless the "literature" appears in Shonksville extremist publications like Journal of American Physicians & Surgeons ~ where Richard Lindzen has published [more a rant than a paper]).

   I keenly look forward to Ari Jokimaki's next instalment.

   (My apologies, Ari — for I haven't discovered how to correctly make the umlaut in your surname. ) 

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5. Bob Loblaw at 09:50 AM on 19 October, 2017

   Derek:

   Scientific journals are rarely interested in papers that just point out errors in other papers. You will occasionally see "Comment on..." short contributions, but not often.

   Scientists also don't get much credit for publishing such critiques - career advancement is based on new research, not pointing out that junk was published that ignored vast quantities of old research and got many basic things wrong.

   ...but it does happen. Read this RealClimate post from a couple of years ago that tells the sorty of publishing such a paper.

   Let's Learn From Mistakes

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6. Lachlan at 13:15 PM on 19 October, 2017

   I really like the "pressure heating" theory.  As I recall, it says that heating is due to the effect of gravity on the atmosphere — i.e., "the sky is falling".  They accuse climate "alarmists" of being Chicken Licken saying that the sky is falling, and I was tickled pink to see some deniers actually claiming that heating is literally because the sky is falling.

   (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

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7. Lachlan at 13:16 PM on 19 October, 2017

   I forgot to mention: in many universities, plagiarism is grounds for explusion, not just failing.

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8. BaerbelW at 14:23 PM on 19 October, 2017

   Eclectic @4 - you can already read the other three articles which are linked from this one. They just don't yet show up on the homepage, but will in due course.

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9. Eclectic at 19:33 PM on 19 October, 2017

   BaerbelW @8 , thank you for that !

   How embarrassing.  I saw: October 17th, Part 1 of a series . . . etc etc

   I must remember that the pretty blue text can be clicked on !

   Please excuse my Kopffurz (if that's the correct word for my idiocy).

   I shall get reading.

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10. Derek at 23:17 PM on 20 October, 2017

    Thanks @4 Eclectic and @5 Bob.  Eclectic, I was actually referring to a paper I read where a geographer suggested an increase in seismicity at a mid-ocean ridge meant that there was increased heat flow into the oceans, which was in turn causing the oceans and atmosphere to warm.   I'm a seismologist, and the seismology part of the paper seemed pretty poorly done.    But as the link Bob posted shows, maybe this is not the best use of my time--probably better to be teaching my students how to be better critical thinkers!

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11. Eclectic at 00:46 AM on 21 October, 2017

    Derek @10 , yes , thanks , and your point is an important one about cost-effective use of that finite resource [time].  And it very likely is correct that your own time is better spent in "raising" the younger cohorts to be more resistant to the BS which is swallowed by that substantial minority of oldies we know as Denialists — and more resistant through better critical thinking as well as through greater insight into their own tendencies toward motivated reasoning (etc).

    Still, there are millions of scientific-minded citizens — and with a great diversity of interests . . . so it is not unreasonable for some percentage of them to give part of their time to "wrestle with the alligators" right now, while teachers such as yourself tackle the longer term plan of "swamp-drainage".  [Please excuse the currently over-used analogy!]  So I fully support Ari Jokimaki & his colleagues in their actions here.

    On a side-note, being your mention of Global Warming from mid-ocean ridge warming : I must say that even I as a non-seismologist, can see that that particular argument has more holes in it than does Swiss cheese.  Yet the Denialists will grasp at every straw they can see, despite all those straws being mutually contradictory.

    And on the pressure-temperature thing, I have a salient memory (from my childhood) of my grandfather's extensive library containing a science book [copyrighted 1893, if I recall properly] which declared that the scientists had calculated that the Sun's output of heat was produced by the mechanism of gravitational collapse.  The scientists opined that the Sun's diameter was shrinking by around 200 feet per year.  (And as has been mentioned elsewhere, the discrepancy with terrestrial geology was not addressed.)

     

    MODERATORS : I am wondering if you would consider merging the comments columns for The F13 files Parts 1-4 .   There may be enough commonality & overlap, to justify having all comments in a single thread.

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12. Bob Loblaw at 01:37 AM on 21 October, 2017

    Derek:

    Geothermal heat flow is, on average, pretty small. It is tiny compared to the radiative forcing from added CO2. To quote this Wikipedia page:

    Mean heat flow is 65 mW/m2 over continental crust and 101 mW/m2 over oceanic crust. This is 0.087 watt/square meter on average (0.03 percent of solar power absorbed by the Earth[15] ), but is much more concentrated in areas where thermal energy is transported toward the crust by convection such as along mid-ocean ridges and mantle plumes.

    To contribute to global warming, you would have to have a significant increase in this quantity - like 10x more globally-averaged, which means probably 1000s time more in local areas. It ain't happening.

    [I would try to defend classifying "geographers", as that is my background, buit "geographer" varies an awful lot and some of them are awfully ignorant on climate - such as TIm Ball.]

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13. nigelj at 08:24 AM on 21 October, 2017

    Derek, I live in New Zealand, right on a techtonic plate boundary, with significant volcanic and geothermal activity. Plus we recently had a big earthquake in Christchurch (but dont panic, very nice place overall).

    Global warming is about 1 degree so in the middle of the range. We get a lot of electricity from geothermal energy, and theres no evidence of increasing trend of geothermal and / or volcanic activity that I'm aware of over the last 150 years.

    Of course one country and anecdotal, but you have to start somewhere and its interesting.The whole idea that geothermal or undersea volcanic activity is driving climate change is invalid, because its contribution to warming is small, and theres no evidence of increases globally over the last century as a trend, and its hard to see why there would be. I also did some physical geography at university, so take an interest in what the earths crust is getting up to.

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14. Daniel Bailey at 09:45 AM on 21 October, 2017

    "increased heat flow into the oceans"

    The oceans are warming, top-down.  If increased heat flow into the oceans from subaerial volcanoes were the cause, we'd expect to not only see warming more botton-up, but we'd have to invent a whole new branch of physics to explain why rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 aren't warming the oceans.
    
    Per Cheng et al 2017:

    "OHC has increased fairly steadily and, since 1990, has increasingly involved deeper layers of the ocean. In addition, OHC changes in six major oceans are reliable on decadal timescales.

    All ocean basins examined have experienced significant warming since 1998, with the greatest warming in the southern oceans, the tropical/subtropical Pacific Ocean, and the tropical/subtropical Atlantic Ocean."

    And:

    "The new result (Fig. 6) suggests a total full-depth ocean warming of 33.5 ± 7.0 × 1022 J (equal to a net heating of 0.37 ± 0.08W/m2 over the global surface and over the 56-year period) from 1960 to 2015, with 36.5, 20.4, 30.3, and 12.8% contributions from the 0- to 300-m, 300-to 700-m, 700- to 2000-m, and below 2000-m layers, respectively."

    

    Larger image HERE.

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15. Marco at 04:57 AM on 23 October, 2017

    Sadly, bad papers are common, and getting them retracted is almost impossible. Some journals (read: Editors) react quickly to concerns, others just don't care or are too busy.

    Now, I note that in part 4 it is stated "He told us that they had checked the issue with "iThenticate", which didn't show high similarity. This means that they took F13 and their earlier book chapter and compared them to each other". I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. iThenticate checks all sources that it can access. Sometimes it does take some extra steps when a paper is already published to find the plagiarism, as it may primarily highlight the same paper as the source. You then need to actively deselect that source. So, maybe the EiC just didn't do that.

     

    I also don't think Elsevier can be blamed so much, here. It looks like it is primarily the EiC who did everything he could to evade the issue. Having had my own contact with an Elsevier representative regarding >1000 fundamentally flawed papers (that's not a typo: more than 1000) in another field, I am somewhat sympathetic to their view that the Publisher should be very hesitant in meddling with the science that they publish. This is what the Editorial Boards are for. They may make more of an issue out of the plagiarism, so you should perhaps send the plagiarism overview to the Elsevier executive, and complain that the EiC does not take any action.

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16. Ari Jokimäki at 00:44 AM on 26 October, 2017

    Marco, thank you for the correction regarding the iThenticate. I have corrected the relevant section of part 4.

    I don't think I would describe the actions of the Editor-in-Chief as trying to evade the issue. I think he handled the issue sloppily, but I haven't seen any evidence that would suggest that he was deliberately trying to evade the issue.

    As was noted in the part 4, we did send our plagiarism analysis also to the executive publisher of the journal.

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17. Eclectic at 22:34 PM on 28 October, 2017

    Having a far less academic inclination than Ari Jokimaki, I am more offended by Florides's gross errors in the content of the F13 paper.  Though I appreciate that the plagiarism aspect is an easier point of attack when approaching Elsevier.

    Ari will be well aware that Florides had published some similar errors in 2009 and 2010 (possibly without the high level of plagiarism).

    Question: What is an engineer (or three) in Cyprus up to, when he repeatedly publishes statements of very bad science?  [i.e. in an area apparently outside his field of expertise].   Why the repeated gross errors?   Not to mention Florides's refusal to properly engage with criticism, plus his refusal to make corrections.

    It seems hard to go past the conclusion that Florides is simply a zealous crackpot on the subject of climate science.   A denialist who wishes to publish as well as exist as a science-denier.

    When I put on my Ten-Gallon Hat of Suspicion, I wonder whether the large amount of plagiarism in F13 might also point to the presence of a ghost-writer [a hack ghost-writer] supplying the bulk of the draft of the F13 paper (with final touches done by Florides et alia).

    Is it known whether Heartland (or similar propaganda machines) provides a ghost-writing service for amenable denialists, in order to sprinkle the scientific literature with a few handfuls of "contrarian" papers?

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18. ubrew12 at 02:10 AM on 1 November, 2017

    from part 3: "Cook et al (2013) [2] found that only 0.7% of their sample rejected AGW, so F13 references them 50 times more than one would expect of an unbiased sample."  That's clear evidence of bias.  How does a 'review article' get away with such egregious cherry picking?  And the mention, much less discussion, of 'cosmic rays'?  What is such speculative 'research' even doing in a review of established climate science?

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19. ubrew12 at 03:13 AM on 1 November, 2017

    The F13 abstract lead off with: "This paper... suggests that numerical models that lack adequate knowledge of fundamental... factors cannot be used to extract “sound” conclusions."  So, after extensive review, the authors conclude that 'Garbage in = Garbage out'?  Brilliant (/s).  Look, nobody makes a policy decision without a prediction of its outcome, based on a model of the future.  That includes the 'do nothing' alternative.  Trump etal have a model of future climate.  Its probably just an 'it'll be alright, it's always been in the Past' model put in their heads by Fox News, but its still a model, and all models are wrong (the future cannot be perfectly predicted).  The purpose of research is to make newer predictive models 'less wrong' than others.  This implies that model comparison's are necessary to the process of continuous improvement.  So, where are the denier models?  Big fossils makes a trillion dollars in pure profit annually: where are its competing climate models?  Where is Florides model?  On what basis is Trump taking the 'do nothing' alternative?  If you refuse to make something better than the moon, then you are stuck howling at the moon, which explains Florides first sentence, which reaches a conclusion any freshman studying 'C++' is taught in the first week of instruction.

    Florides abstract: "science does not really have a complete... understanding of the factors affecting the earth's complex climate system and therefore no sound conclusions can be drawn."  It doesn't matter for two reasons: 1) Policy must be made anyway.  To make rational decisions requires the best predictive tools we have, regardless of our incomplete state of knowledge. 2) There is no such thing as a 'sound conclusion'.  I'm reminded that, deciding how many Americans to send into Iwo Jima, planners developed a differential equation which assumed each Japanese would fight to the death.  Was it accurate?  Of course not.  It was simply the best planning tool they had, so they used it.  The calculation that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere will raise Earth's temperature by 4 C predates computer modelling by 75 years.  Policy should be made on that basis, and not on the shifting goalposts of a denier like Florides, for whom scientific modelling will never be good enough because, happily for him, he doesn't have to front a competing model but gets paid apparently to be a professional critic.  

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20. leapy99 at 11:23 AM on 3 November, 2017

    Well done on your research of this paper and your efforts to hold the journal/authors to account.
    One approach that you could try is to write a letter describing what has transpired to other journals to see if they might be interested in publishing your current critique paper. If they think the error are bad enough there’s a chance they would enjoy slinging some mud at Elsevier and publish your paper. However, sadly I think that this has only a smaller chance of success.
    It is most likely that the Elsevier editor may have been right in suggesting the only way to move forward is a more general article critiquing this and other papers. Trying to publish an article that focuses on a critique of a single article is hard in science. The reason is that unless the errors are egregious, scientists try to avoid head on criticism of other scientists work and would rather focus on the science than the work of the researchers.

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