There's a puzzling article by Richard Black at the BBC on the resignation of the editor of the science journal Remote Sensing.
The back story is that Remote Sensing published a peer-reviewed paper by two climate scientists who are skeptical that computer models which project dire global temperature increases are correct. It's their view that a negative feedback is being interpreted as though it were a positive feedback resulting in temperature projections that are excessively inflated.
The paper, written by Roy Spencer and William Braswell, has been heavily criticized by the climatological community for not taking into account counter-arguments that had appeared in other journals allegedly addressing the very complaint they raise.
Wolfgang Wagner, editor of Remote Sensing, says he agrees with those who have taken him to task for publishing the Spencer/Braswell paper and is stepping down, presumably as an act of professional contrition.
This resignation strikes me as odd because nowhere in the article is there reference to any specific error in Spencer and Braswell's work. It's never made clear what it is about publishing this paper that's so egregious as to warrant the editor's decision to fall on his sword.
In fact Spencer is so confident of the science in his paper that he's challenging anyone who thinks they've found an error or evidence of shoddy methodology to publish a peer-reviewed critique. In essence, he's telling them to put up or shut up.
A second thing that's odd about the BBC article is that the caption of a photo of Spencer accompanying the article states that he's "a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist." What does his religion have to do with this? What's the purpose of mentioning it? Is this intended to be some sort of smear? Is the implication supposed to be that Christians can't do responsible climate science? Would a photo of a proponent of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming be accompanied by a caption declaring him to be an atheist, if indeed he were one?
It's all very strange.
