Professor Wolfgang Wagner, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing, has resigned from his position after admitting that a recent paper that cast doubt on human-induced climate change should not have been published.
In a resignation note published in the journal, Prof. Wagner mentioned that the paper entitled On the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in Earth's radiant energy balance by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell was "fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal". He also mentioned that "peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science."
The paper, published in July, was swiftly attacked by climate scientists, because of its flawed research. They also commented on the fact that the paper was not published in a journal that routinely deals with climate change – this is a common tactic employed by scientists trying to get a paper published that would otherwise not pass the scrutiny of an editor trained in the field. The journal's core topic is methods for monitoring aspects of the Earth from space.
The paper was widely cited in "sceptical" circles through its claim that mainstream climate models inflated temperature projections through misunderstanding the role of clouds in the climate system and the rate at which the Earth radiated heat into space. This meant, it said, that projections of temperature rise made in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports were too high.
Prof. Wagner, a professor of remote sensing at Vienna University of Technology, is blaming himself for the failing, but he also blames the researchers themselves for not referencing all the relevant research in their manuscript.
Scientific papers that turn out to be flawed or fraudulent are usually retracted by the journals that publish them, with editorial resignations a rarity. But on a topic as heated (ahem) as climate change, the damage caused by spreading the misinformation cannot be undone by a simple retraction. This could be why Prof. Wagner decided to resign.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said Dr Wagner chose the right course of action. "It was a mistake, he's owned up to it and taken an honourable course, and I think he's to be commended for it," he said.
