Journal editor resigns over climate-change paper

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/47165

The editor of the journal Remote Sensing has resigned over a climate-change paper that he admits should "not have been published". Wolfgang Wagner of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria announced his resignation on 2 September, taking responsibility for his reviewers’ decision to publish the "controversial paper".

Climate debate

Every year, one or two sceptical papers get published, and these are then trumpeted by sympathetic media outlets as if they had discovered the wheelAndrew Dessler of Texas A&M University

Climate scientist Kerry Emanuel from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the affair reflects the broad debate over climate change rather than the specific detail of the Spencer–Braswell paper. "There's a huge discrepancy between what the paper says and what people, including Roy Spencer, say that it says," he explains. "People seem to be replying to the climate-change sceptics rather than the paper itself."

Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University agrees. "Every month, dozens if not hundreds of papers are published that are in agreement with the mainstream theory of climate science," he says. "But every year, one or two sceptical papers get published, and these are then trumpeted by sympathetic media outlets as if they had discovered the wheel. It therefore appears to the general public that there's a debate."