McKitrick: ugly, ugly incident

Ross McKitrick zegt altijd duidelijk waar het op staat. Op de website The Air Vent reageerde hij op Nick Stokes, die Trenberth in de luwte probeert te houden. McKitrick legt uit waarom alles in de richting van Trenberth wijst en windt er ook geen doekjes om wat hij van Wagner vindt:

Nick, If you think that “Trenberth is not centrally involved” then why is Trenberth’s the only paper cited by Wagner and why do Trenberth&friends say:

“Kevin Trenberth received a personal note of apology from both the editor-in-chief and the publisher of Remote Sensing.
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/09/spencer-faulty-science

Or are you going to hide behind the adjective “centrally” and reply that we don’t know for sure if someone else might have been even more centrally involved? In that case, Wagner must have made multiple personal apologies. But all that means is that he is even more of a grovelling, terrified coward than he already has made himself out to be. As for your claim, what we know is that Trenberth was sufficiently involved to have received personal apologies from Wagner and from the publisher of RS.

Can you imagine the content of those conversations in a way that does not make you feel ill? Why the hell would any journal editor apologize to an uninvolved third party for publishing a paper that passed their peer review process? No matter how much you might disagree with a paper you read, would you, Nick Stokes, ever dream of contacting the editor and demanding an apology? To do so would be arrogance on the level of psychopathy.

Ask yourself: not just why did Wagner resign, but why did he apologize to Trenberth? Give us a plausible sequence of events that leads to that outcome, in which Trenberth is not centrally involved.

Also, Wagner does not say he is resigning because he disagrees with RS management practices regarding referee selection, he is saying he is resigning because of the publication of S&B, even though he can’t point to any flaws in the process and he has not received any rebuttal papers and his own journal doesn’t plan to retract the paper.

His reasons for resigning simply don’t stand up. There is prima facie evidence that Trenberth communicated with him over this paper, which implies backroom pressure, rather than open debate. You’re not that obtuse, Nick, c’mon. This is an ugly, ugly incident. Pick other things to defend: stay well clear of this horror show.