[Vision2020] Correction: GISS Director Gavin Schmidt Comments on Climate Science Publishing Peer Review Failure

[Ted Moffett]

I need to read more carefully... The word "hard" was not misspelled in the
title to Gavin Schmidt's Realclimate.org article referenced below.  Schmidt
must have deliberately made a play on the name of the author of the
questionable article, Hermann Harde.
----------------------------------------
Some of the claims in this article even a layperson student of climate
science
such as myself would immediately know to be false.  Good grief!  Has "fake
news" invaded science publishing?

The flawed article is given below, from Global and Planetary Change, in an
issue that is pending (note the May 2017 reference), though the article is
"final and fully citable:"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818116304787

*H. Harde, "Scrutinizing the carbon cycle and CO2 residence time in the
atmosphere", Global and Planetary Change, 2017*.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.02.009
--------------------------------------
Gavin Schmidt's commentary from Realclimate.org is below, with the comments
(42 as of now) section readable at the website below.  I just had to
correct the misspelling of "hard" as "harde" though a genius like Schmidt
could care less about the pedantic spelling police (me):
---------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/02/
something-harde-to-believe/
Something Harde to believe…
Filed under:

   - Carbon cycle
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/carbon-cycle/>
   - Climate Science
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>
   - IPCC
   <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/ipcc/>

— gavin @ 25 February 2017

A commenter brings news of an obviously wrong paper that has just appeared
in Global and Planetary Change
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09218181>. The paper
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/02/something-harde-to-believe/#ITEM-20160-0>
purports to be a radical revision of our understanding of the carbon cycle
by Hermann Harde. The key conclusions are (and reality in green):

   - The average residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is found to be 4
   years.

   [The residence time for an individual molecule is not the same as the
   perturbation response time of the carbon cycle which has timescales of
   decades to thousands of years.]
   - The anthropogenic fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere is only 4.3%.

   [Actually, it’s 30%.]
   - Human emissions only contribute 15% to the CO2 increase over the
   Industrial Era.

   [It’s all of it.]

Since these points contradict multiple
<https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions-intermediate.htm>
independent <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87> sources
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=160> of evidence, I can, without
hesitation, predict that there are fundament flaws in this paper that will
raise serious questions about the quality of the peer-review that this
paper went through. Oddly, this paper is labeled as an “Invited Research
Article” and so maybe some questions might be asked of the editor
responsible too.

Notwithstanding our last post
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/02/someone-c-a-r-e-s/>
on the difficulty in getting comments published, this paper is crying out
for one.

But this kind of thing has been done before, does not require any great
sophistication or computer modeling to rebut, and has come up so many times
before (Salby
<https://www.skepticalscience.com/salby_correlation_conundrum.html> (also
here
<https://quantpalaeo.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/the-most-interesting-part-of-murry-salbys-lecture/>),
Beck
<http://www.biomind.de/treibhaus/180CO2/Response-Beck-by-R-Keeling-2.doc>,
Segalstad
<http://forskning.no/meninger/kronikk/2008/08/co2-okningen-er-ikke-naturlig>,
Jaworowski etc.), that perhaps a crowd-sourced rebuttal would be useful.

So, we’ll set up an overleaf.com page for this (a site for collaborative
LaTeX projects), and anyone who wants to contribute should put the gist of
their point in the comments and we’ll send the link so you can add it to
the draft. Maybe the citizen scientists among you can pull together a
rebuttal faster than the professionals?
References

   1. H. Harde, "Scrutinizing the carbon cycle and CO2 residence time in
   the atmosphere", *Global and Planetary Change*, 2017.
   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.02.009
   <http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.02.009>

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