Over on Dr Roy Spencer’s site, Roy has updated his thread on his response to Desslers rebuttal paper in press at GRL.
UPDATE: I have been contacted by Andy Dessler, who is now examining my calculations, and we are working to resolve a remaining difference there. Also, apparently his paper has not been officially published, and so he says he will change the galley proofs as a result of my blog post; here is his message:
“I’m happy to change the introductory paragraph of my paper when I get the galley proofs to better represent your views. My apologies for any misunderstanding. Also, I’ll be changing the sentence “over the decades or centuries relevant for long-term climate change, on the other hand, clouds can indeed cause significant warming” to make it clear that I’m talking about cloud feedbacks doing the action here, not cloud forcing.”
Update #2 (Sept. 8, 2011): I have made several updates as a result of correspondence with Dessler, which will appear underlined, below. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether it was our Remote Sensing paper that should not have passed peer review (as Trenberth has alleged), or Dessler’s paper meant to refute our paper.
Reactions to this development in comments on that thread and the WUWT counterpart are interesting. They range from anger to joy. Two examples:
JJ says:Dr. Spencer:
Next time, consider not responding to the preprint. Let the arrogant @#$% and his dishonest, disrespectful teammates publish their rush to poor judgement, then let them take their lumps in the literature.
Pissants who whine about you ‘forcing others to correct your serial mistakes’ do not deserve your patient assistance in keeping their agenda driven incompetance and shoddiness off the record.
JJ
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tallbloke says:
Steven Mosher says:
September 8, 2011 at 9:47 pm
Kudos to Dessler for working with people who he disagrees with.
Kudos to Spencer for working with people he disagrees with.
If you want to see more of it, encourage it. put the knives down and encourage it.
Spencer and Dessler communicating to sort things out in a businesslike, dispassionate, scientific way is making Trenberth look really, really bad right now.
What a shame. 🙂
I’m all for Dessler ‘coming over the wall’ and I’m happy to see Spencer holding out a steadying hand to him.
Velvet revolutions begin in this way.
The Team members are looking at each other right now and wondering who gets to be Ceaucescu.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
I’m with you, Mosh and Spencer. Of course.
Dessler states he will change sentences of his paper. However, he is not allowed to do that at this stage. Scientific statements cannot be changed without another roud by reviewers…
Count me in as well. This has got to be a first hasn’t it?
A comment from Kev might be interesting.
Fido,
my reflex on Roy’s blog was to agree with you, and you are technically correct. But I think there’s another way to look at this.
You just saw Dessler appoint Roy Spencer as a pre-publication reviewer, and the whole thing played out in front of your eyes in the sceptical part of the blogosphere! 🙂
This is an unconventional but exciting development in the way climate science is conducted. A real breath of fresh air. You might say that since it was Spencer Dessler was rebutting, then if Roy is happy for Dessler to publish the paper he helped revise, then all is well.
That’s not to say they don’t still have disagreements over which is the best data, and what are the correct parameters and equations, but it does get some of the trivia out of the way and allow for faster progress.
If Roy doesn’t insist on the paper going back to the reviewers, that fact will not be lost on GRL’s editors, and they would have to expedite publication of any paper Roy now submits to them in respect of Dessler 2011, or look really, really bad, along with travesty Trenberth.
Will Dessler 2011 have to be peer reviewed again, and is the journal obliged to use the original reviewers?
I hope that this starts a trend. After all of the hand-wringing and drama, huge Kudos to both Dessler and Spencer for putting on their big boy pants and talking this out like professionals.
Maybe there’s hope for this field yet.
Climate science being done properly. There’s a novelty. The team must be livid.
It will be interesting to see if Andy Dessler gets the Judith Curry ex-communication treatment….
re Mosh’s comment – quick where’s Josh!
Almost as if there is some civility left in the Climate Debate – not Climate Science, which is about people learning things, but in the Debate, which is a political thing.
I would sure like to know what thinkest the three reviewers who Wagner insinuated were incompetent or corrupted by their personal stake to skepticism about CAGW (or are they 3 of the “pseudo-scientists” paid by Big Oil and Big Coal to distort the Truth and subvert Environmental Justice?).
You think anyone is ever going to ask them to review anything again, and do you think the Community might know who they are and have just learned to keep their distance from them?
Rhetorical.
GRL state about papers in press:
“Papers in Press is a service for subscribers that allows immediate citation and access to accepted manuscripts prior to copyediting and formatting according to AGU style. Manuscripts are removed from this list upon publication.”
The AGU Authors Guide states: “Once the figures pass technical requirements, your final figures and text will be combined into
a PDF file that is placed on the journal’s Papers in Press page. Papers in Press is a service for subscribers that
allows immediate citation and access to accepted manuscripts prior to copyediting and formatting according to
AGU style.”
The Publishing Guidelines state:
“An author should make no changes to a paper after it has been accepted. If there is a compelling reason to make changes, the author is obligated to inform the editor directly of the nature of the desired change. Only the editor has the final authority to approve any such requested changes.”
As the changes suggested by Dessler are greater than “copyediting and formatting” it seems the paper must be withdrawn and a new version submitted and reviewed. Any comment?
Well, we don’t have to agree on all points to be agreeable. I’m glad to see a mutual pursuit of the science. Dessler and Spencer have set a fine example for others to follow. pg
Josh’s take:
^ that is awesome.