The Giant's Footprint (aka Where is Salby’s Peer Reviewed Article?)

A gentleman commented on my blog the other day pointing me to another article written by our resident climate skeptic Eric Booth issuing a challenge to all those that subscribe to climate change driven by CO2. It was a talk given by Professor Murry Salby.

I figured it must be pretty good stuff seeing as when I did a search on his name there were blogs titled:

“An Emily Litella moment for climate science and CO2”
“Greenie Watch”
"It continues to unravel"
“Al Gore, My Favourite Whore”
“The Climate Scum: Salby Demolishes AGW Theory”
“Another Nail in the Coffin”
“Prof. Murry Salby falsifies Anthropogenic Global Warming”

and my personal favourite:

"The Climate Change Debate Should be Declared Over!"

It is interesting to note how many of these blog posts spread out like wild-fire in the first week of August, telling the exact same story with very little analysis or original commentary.

So I went to search for the peer reviewed paper but I ran into a problem, I couldn't find it. Most of these blogs were dated around Aug 2011, most likely soon after the talk was given and some of them talked about a paper being submitted for review. The latest blog dated April of this year said 6 months until it was to be published.

All this celebration and it hadn't even been reviewed yet.

Please, by all means, if you know where Salby’s article has been published in a peer-reviewed publication, throw me a link and I’ll change this posts title.

In the meantime there has been a rebuttal. A few actually.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Murry-Salby-Confused-About-The-Carbon-Cycle.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/08/unforced-variations-aug-2011/ from about comment 37 on. Pay special attention to comment 81 as to why no one in the “warmist” camp is getting all hot and bothered by Salby’s talk.

And of course Professor’s Salby’s co-worker Professor Colin Prentice had something to say as well, just scroll down to the bottom of the page:

http://www.climatefutures.mq.edu.au/eventsandnews/commentary/

Notice the blurb under the link (emphasis mine):
“This article is in response to a recent talks delivered at the IUGG and Sydney Institute by Professor Murry Salby. As Professor Salby has not yet provided any data (published or unpublished) to support the ideas presented, this piece is a response to the verbal content of his talk only.”

Me, I'll wait for a peer-reviewed journal like the Journal of Climate (or some other peer-reviewed source) to publish the paper and then get excited about the prospect of an underdog scientist defeating the establishment scientists.

I am reminded though that this is one scientist with one paper (that has not been reviewed yet), so I fall back on Michael Shermer's ten famous rules for unearthing bullshit:

Drumroll please.

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?