May 16, 2012
Sacrifice Amid the Ice: Facing Facts on the Scott Expedition
Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates with ponies. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
For Lawrence Oates, the race to the South Pole had a portentous start. Just two days after the Terra Nova Expedition left New Zealand in November 1910, a violent storm killed two of the 19 ponies in Oates’s care and nearly sank the ship. His journey ended almost two years later, when he stepped out of a tent and into the teeth of an Antarctic blizzard after uttering ten words that would bring tears of pride to mourning Britons. During the long months in between, Oates’s concern for the ponies paralleled his growing disillusionment with the expedition’s leader, Robert Falcon Scott.
Oates had paid one thousand pounds for the privilege of joining Scott on an expedition that was supposed to combine exploration with scientific research. It quickly became a race to the South Pole after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, already at sea with a crew aboard the Fram, abruptly changed his announced plan to go to the North Pole. “BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTIC—AMUNDSEN,” read the telegram he sent to Scott. It was clear that Amundsen would leave the collecting of rock specimens and penguin eggs to the Brits; he wanted simply to arrive first at the pole and return home to claim glory on the lecture circuit.
Oates, circa 1911. Photo: Wikipedia
Born in 1880 to a wealthy English family, Lawrence Oates attended Eton before serving as a junior officer in the Second Boer War. A gunshot wound in a skirmish that earned Oates the nickname “Never Surrender” shattered his thigh, leaving his left leg an inch shorter than his right.
Still, Robert Scott wanted Oates along for the expedition, but once Oates made it to New Zealand, he was startled to see that a crew member (who knew dogs but not horses) had already purchased ponies in Manchuria for five pounds apiece. They were “the greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen,” Oates said. From past expeditions, Scott had deduced that white or gray ponies were stronger than darker horses, though there was no scientific evidence for that. When Oates told him that the Manchurian ponies were unfit for the expedition, Scott bristled and disagreed. Oates seethed and stormed away.
Inspecting the supplies, Oates quickly surmised that there was not enough fodder, so he bought two extra tons with his own money and smuggled the feed aboard the Terra Nova. When, to great fanfare, Scott and his crew set off from New Zealand for Antarctica on November 29, 1910, Oates was already questioning the expedition in letters home to his mother: “If he [Amundsen] gets to the Pole first we shall come home with our tails between our legs and make no mistake. I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves all that photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc. etc. is rot and if we fail it will only make us look more foolish.” Oates went on to praise Amundsen for planning to use dogs and skis rather than walking beside horses. “If Scott does anything silly such as underfeeding his ponies he will be beaten as sure as death.”
After a harrowingly slow journey through pack ice, the Terra Nova arrived at Ross Island in Antarctica on January 4, 1911. The men unloaded and set up base at Camp Evans, as some crew members set off in February on an excursion in the Bay of Whales, off the Ross Ice Shelf—where they caught sight of Amundsen’s Fram at anchor. The next morning they saw Amundsen himself, crossing the ice at a blistering pace on his dog sled as he readied his animals for an assault on the South Pole, some 900 miles away. Scott’s men had had nothing but trouble with their own dogs, and their ponies could only plod along on the depot-laying journeys they were making to store supplies for the pole run.
Given their weight and thin legs, the ponies would plunge through the top layer of snow; homemade snowshoes worked only on some of them. On one journey, a pony fell and the dogs pounced, ripping at its flesh. Oates knew enough to keep the ponies away from the shore, having learned that several ponies on Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907-1909) had fallen dead after eating salty sand there. But he also knew some of his animals simply would not hold up on any lengthy journey. He suggested to Scott that they kill the weaker ones and store the meat for the dogs at depots on the way to the pole. Scott would have none of it, even though he knew that Amundsen was planning to kill many of his 97 Greenland dogs for the same purpose.
“I have had more than enough of this cruelty to animals,” Scott replied, “and I’m not going to defy my feelings for the sake of a few days’ march.”
“I’m afraid you’ll regret it, Sir,” Oates answered.
The Terra Nova crews continued with their depot-laying runs, with the dogs becoming “thin as rakes” from long days of heavy work and light rations. Two ponies died of exhaustion during a blizzard. Oates continued to question Scott’s planning. In March of 1911, with expedition members camped on the ice in McMurdo Sound, a crew woke in the middle of the night to a loud cracking noise; they left their tents to discover they were stranded on a moving ice floe. Floating beside them on another floe were the ponies.
The men hopped over to the animals and began moving them from floe to flow, trying to get them back to the Ross Ice Shelf to safety. It was slow work, as they often had to wait for another floe to drift close enough to make any progress at all.
Then a pod of killer whales began circling the floe, poking their heads out of the water to see over the floe’s edge, their eyes trained on the ponies. As Henry Bowers described in his diary, “the huge black and yellow heads with sickening pig eyes only a few yards from us at times, and always around us, are among the most disconcerting recollections I have of that day. The immense fins were bad enough, but when they started a perpendicular dodge they were positively beastly.”
Oates, Scott and others came to help, with Scott worried about losing his men, let alone his ponies. Soon, more than a dozen orcas were circling, spooking the ponies until they toppled into the water. Oates and Bowers tried to pull them to safety, but they proved too heavy. One pony survived by swimming to thicker ice. Bowers finished off the rest with a pick axe so the orcas at least wouldn’t eat them alive.
“These incidents were too terrible,” Scott wrote.
Worse was to come. In November 1911, Oates left Cape Evans with 14 other men, including Scott, for the South Pole. The depots had been stocked with food and supplies along the route. “Scott’s ignorance about marching with animals is colossal,” Oates would write. “Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition.… He is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere.”
Scott's party at the South Pole, from left to righ:, Wilson, Bowers, Evans, Scott and Oates. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Unlike Scott, Amundsen paid attention to every detail, from the proper feeding of both dogs and men to the packing and unpacking of the loads they would carry, to the most efficient ski equipment for various mixtures of snow and ice. His team traveled twice as fast as Scott’s, which had resorted to manhauling their sledges.
By the time Scott and his final group of Oates, Bowers, Edward Wilson and Edgar Evans had reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, they saw a black flag whipping in the wind. “The worst has happened,” Scott wrote. Amundsen had beaten them by more than a month.
“The POLE,” Scott wrote. “Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day—add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22 degrees, and companions laboring on with cold feet and hands.… Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”
The return to Camp Evans was sure to be “dreadfully long and monotonous,” Scott wrote. It wasn’t monotonous. Edgar Evans took a fall on February 4th and became “dull and incapable,” according to Scott; he died two weeks later after another fall near the Beardmore Glacier. The four survivors were suffering from frostbite and malnutrition, but seemingly constant blizzards, temperatures of 40 degrees below zero and snowblindness limited their progress back to camp.
Oates, in particular, was suffering. His old war wound now practically crippled him, and his feet were “probably gangrene,” according to Ross D.E. MacPhee’s Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole. Oates asked Scott, Bowers and Wilson to go on without him, but the men refused. Trapped in their tent during a blizzard on March 16th or 17th (Scott’s journal no longer recorded dates), with food and supplies nearly gone, Oates stood up. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said—his last ten words.
The others knew he was going to sacrifice himself to increase their odds of returning safely, and they tried to dissuade him. But Oates didn’t even bother to put his boots on before disappearing into the storm. He was 31. “It was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman,” Scott wrote.
John Charles Dollman's A Very Gallant Gentleman, 1913. Photo: Wikipedia
Two weeks later, Scott himself was the last to go. “Had we lived,” Scott wrote in one of his last diary entries, “I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”
Roald Amundsen was already telling his tale, one of triumph and a relatively easy journey to and from the South Pole. Having sailed the Fram into Tasmania earlier in March, he knew nothing of Scott’s ordeal—only that there had been no sign of the Brits at the pole when the Norwegians arrived. Not until October 1912 did the weather improve enough for a relief expedition from Terra Nova to head out in search of Scott and his men. The next month they came upon Scott’s last camp and cleared the snow from the tent. Inside, they discovered the three dead men in their sleeping bags. Oates’s body was never found.
Sources
Books: Ross D.E. MacPhee, Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole, American Museum of Natural History and Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2010. Robert Falcon Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1996. David Crane, Scott of the Antarctic: A Biography, Vintage Books, 2005. Roland Huntford, Scott & Amundsen: The Race to the South Pole, Putnam, 1980.
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I can’t take a blog on history seriously if they use a book by Roland Huntford as a source. Read the primary sources (they are all available) and make your own mind up. Most books on history should be focused on a neutral view point, Huntford should not cited by anyone reputable, or knowledgable.
Ben, I have half a dozen well-reviewed books on Scott and the Terra Nova Expedition, all of which cite portions of Roland Huntford’s work as a source–including authors such as Ranulph Fiennes and Susan Solomon, who dispute some of Huntford’s conclusions. Are there any specific facts or points of view that you take issue with in this piece?
Gilbert, I am not sure where to start, Huntford’s book is a sensationalist biased and has in my view been utterly discredited. To say that Fiennes disputes “some” of Huntford’s conclusions is an understatement, his book is almost entirely written as a counter to Huntford, and does not find any points which it agrees on. Susan Solomon’s book also tares shreds out of Huntford’s conclusions.
Some of the points I would take issue with, in either the content or the way in which they are explained.
“once Oates made it to New Zealand, he was startled to see that a crew member (who knew dogs but not horses) had already purchased ponies in Manchuria’ This implies that Oates felt he should have been sent to buy the horses, but this was not possible as he was not released from his regiment in time.
Meares (who knew dogs not horses, but also knew Russian and the area where the horses were bought) should have been able to buy good horses as he was given the assurance of the local governor in Siberia that he would help him find good horses. Meares also had the help of a russian groom who journeyed to Antarctica with the horses, He was an experienced jockey who also should have been able to give advice on getting fit and healthy horses. For one reason or another that I do not know he was unable to acquire satisfactory horses.
“Given their weight and thin legs, the ponies would plunge through the top layer of snow; homemade snowshoes worked only on some of them. On one journey, a pony fell and the dogs pounced, ripping at its flesh.”
This section implies that the surface of the snow in Antarctica is consistent and that the horses slipped through the crust all the time, this would not have been true, for much of the time the surface was hard and more than capable of holding the weight of a horse. Indeed some of the time the top layer did melt from hard ice to a soft slush but far from all of the marches. For reference I would suggest a look at The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott by David M. Wilson. The horses are pictured standing on a hard surface in many of the photographs.
The fact that the dogs were not well enough controlled to stop them savaging one of the ponies, does not infer that more would be a good idea for the British team. Each expedition had to play to its strengths, you may say that the British team should not have been down there with its lack of experience with dogs but they had been set a task and they went about it the best was they were capable. So citing one accident is hardly merits condemning the choice on wether to bring horses or dogs.
It should also be mentioned the reason that Dogs and Horses were not taken all the way to the pole, as Amundsen did, this was due to the fact that the Beardmore glacier which Scott and his team were to ascend to the polar plateau was riddled with crevasses and taking any animals over it would have been very dangerous. Amundsen happened to find the Axel Hidelberg glacier which was much safer for traversing by dogs than the Beardmore, but this was found by chance and not planed.
“I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves” quoting from this section is of interest but it has to be put in to perspective Oates was not responsible for fund raising and making noise about themselves was quite unavoidable as it was a necesity to raise money from public subscription, a few large donations were given but publicity was vital to the expedition succeeding. But money was not an aspect of the expedition that Oates had any understanding other than his own large donation.
These are some of the issues that I would like to take up but it is the general viewpoint taken that is critical of the expedition, without of the reasons why these decisions were taken or any perspective on the decision making process. The general tone of the piece has a lot in common with Huntsford’s viewpoint. I find the truth far more interesting than the fiction that was created by Huntford to sell more copies of his sensationalist book.
Huntford may have done some not so bright things, like blow the Nansen-Kathleen Scott correspondence out of proportion, he is not one to admit that he has made a mistake, and he may have been biased, but overall he did a decent job. Fiennes is nothing more than a con artist who in my estimate makes at least twice as many mistakes as there are pages in his book. The worst part is that he re-writes the facts to suit himself. Case in point: “On 13 March they woke to find a strong wind blowing from the north with a temperature close to -40ºC; a windchill factor of over -90ºC.” (Fiennes, Captain Scott, page 362) Scott recorded no windspeed for March 13 (he recorded temperature and wind direction), and windchill is calculated by temperature and wind speed, so Fiennes is making this windchill up. Run his windchill of -90 C (-130 F) and Captain Scott’s recorded temperature of -37F for March 13 through the NWS’ formula for windchill if you want a laugh at how ridiculous his implied wind speed is. Also: “The new meteorological records demonstrate unarguably why Scott could not in 1912 have foreseen such exceptional weather. It had seemed perfectly safe to Simpson to travel on the Barrier until the end of March. American scientists in the 1990s have established beyond doubt that March 1912 saw abnormally cold and unrelenting temperatures on the Barrier at exactly the time and place where Scott’s men slowed and died. For three straight weeks temperatures were 10ºC below average, conditions which have been repeated only once in the last thirty-eight years.” (Fiennes, Captain Scott, page ix) Here he messes up yet again: the data in and of itself tells us absolutely nothing until it has been analyzed and interpreted as part of the development of a hypothesis. And he keeps making things up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjA3_6x6l0g Here he drops the temperatures immediately after Scott left the South Pole to -50 C! http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/07448d72-2741-11e1-864f-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss Here he falsely claims that Scott pioneered the use of skis in Antarctica (his pronounced North America bashing returns as well). Nope, the first expedition to do that was the Belgica expedition a few years before the Discovery expedition. If you read Frederick A. Cook’s book about it, on the illustration facing page 327 you’ll find a picture of Amundsen on skis. In addition, Fiennes is heavily biased against “Amundsen, Huntford, Shackleton, and anyone else who happened to have an argument with Scott, a rather long list,” as one Amazon reviewer put it.
The only thing Susan Solomon has proven is how easy it is for poisoned science to fool sheeple. She has been discredited for data dragging and logical fallacies, and she made plenty of mistakes herself: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.1272 If you bother watching the Secrets of the Dead episode featuring her, you can watch as she uses the meteorological record of the Second Relief Party to prove that the nine day blizzard never happened (even she can’t get around that), but conveniently ignores the meteorological record of the First Relief Party when it does not support her pro-Scott bias.
Krzysztof I have read your paper previously and do not find it compelling, it may be that the katabatic winds, did not produce a blizzard for the length of time recorded in the diaries of people close to death. But the conclusions that are drawn are somewhat over the top and quite offensive, speculative and without evidence.
I was however very interested in the acknowledgement in some of your versions of the same paper.
You’re referring to his other paper regarding the non-existent nine day blizzard. Obvious Solomon sheeple who has a problem with the truth is obvious. The only reason you find Sienicki’s conclusions “offensive” and “without evidence” is that you can’t handle the truth regarding Solomon and Scott. He gave plenty of evidence, which you would have known had you bothered to read his linked-to article fully. Even if you don’t agree with his explanation, the reality that Solomon was less than honest remains: “Let us call the rare events observed in 1988 and recorded in 1912 year as: streak-1988 and streak-1912, respectively. Solomon’s argument was that because the streak-1988 was
observed then the streak-1912 was also observed by Captain Scott’s party. Now, it is self evident that Solomon as well as those readers who were persuaded on this matter by her book and article fell into the trap of the retrospective Gambler’s fallacy. [My note: And affirmation of the consequent fallacy] There is no logically sound argument that just because streak-1988 occurred, streak-1912 also occurred.” If you criticize his use of the AWS system, you’d better be prepared to criticize Solomon for doing the same.
I am assuming that you are the same Kris that wrote the paper and I apologise if this assumption is incorrect, but I will state again that I do not find the assumptions or conclusions in Sienicki’s paper to be merited.
The quality of a paper is often reflected in the journal in which it is published. Please state which peer reviewed publication Sienicki’s work is to be found.
The acknowledgements on a related paper are somewhat interesting.
“Finally, I wish to thank the editors of Monthly Weather Review for finding that “the field does not find your analysis compelling” and especially to Dr. Tom Hamill (NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory) and Dr. David M. Schultz (Uni- versity of Manchester) who willingly participated in censor- ship, corruption (conflict of interest) of a review process and science.”
Again I would apologise if you are not the author of the aforementioned paper.
Also to apologise to Mr King for a somewhat overly defensive take on his view point.
No need to apologize, Ben. I recognize that the world of polar exploration and its history is a work in progress, and debates like these are an important part of getting at the truth. Much thanks to both you and Kristoffer for your participation here!
I did not write it. The related paper you mentioned (A Note on Several Meteorological Topics Related to Polar Regions) has been published in Problemy Klimatologii Polarnej, a peer reviewed journal (ISSN 1234-0715, as provided in the link) published by Gdynia Maritime University: http://ocean.am.gdynia.pl/p_k_p/pkp_21/Sienicki-pkp21.pdf Please note that his acknowledgement that you listed is there, with slight editing. I am certain Sienicki had his reasons for putting that in there and explained them to the university, or odds are it wouldn’t have made it.
The related paper A Note on Several Meteorological Topics Related to Polar Regions, contains only a section on the Terra-Nova weather data analysis it is also very much watered down. I assume that it had to be modified to make it acceptable for publication. I still do not find the assumptions or the conclusions of either paper as persuasive, personaly I would not have approved it for publication.
The paper that was originally referred to has not been published by any peer reviewed journal, and as such I would find it very difficult to say that on the basis of either of these papers or any others that I am aware of that Solomons work is discredited, as you stated.
Yeah, right, “very much watered down” and “modified to make it acceptable for publication” to the point that it states in the version in Problemy Klimatologii Polarnej that “Additionally, I wish to thank the editors of Monthly Weather Review for finding that “the field does not find your analysis compelling” and especially to Dr. Tom Hamill (NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory) and Dr. David M. Shultz (University of Manchester) who enthusiastically and hypocritically participated in censorship, corruption of a review process and corruption of science.” in the acknowledgements, and on pages 57-58 “The problem goes as far as data dragging, and/or attributing exaggerated data (increasing daily temperatures, wind velocitys and its duration) to the Captain Scott expedition. In the case of Susan Solomon‟s work, there even occurred open falsification of data, to prove the author point”.
Your garbage isn’t going to fly with Mr. King, and it isn’t going to fly with the readers. The article was intended to cover several different topics, with the ones relating to Captain Scott being dealt with in more detail by the other articles. Solomon committed a lot of misrepresentation: you don’t even have to look at Sienicki’s work (which doesn’t need to be published in a peer reviewed journal to be correct) to see that. Like I said in my first comment, just watch the Secrets of the Dead episode featuring her and watch her selectively pick data to prove her point while ignoring data that analysis shows does not support what she has said about the temperature Scott encountered previously.
I was refrying to the content of the paper not the acknowledgements being watered down.
I am sorry but I don’t agree with your viewpoint, I would also restate that there is in my view no credible evidence to discredit Solomon’s work, and by that I do not see Sienicki’s work as credible. There is little point in going in to a slanging match with you over it, as we obviously disagree.
I would also leave it to Mr King and the readers to make up there own mind as to what would fly.
The content of the paper includes the remark about Solomon which I listed. Quit shifting the goal posts. If you look at the arXiv version of the paper (which you presumably had) with the Problemy Klimatologii Polarnej version (published after the arXiv version), you’d see that the two are the same except for the latter having an attached note. Your constant claims about “without evidence” and not seeing his work as credible, without offering one single example and being unable to refute my pointing out of Solomon’s discreditable poisoned science (without having to reference Sienicki), sink your credibility. Continue being a Solomon shill, it won’t make a difference. Don’t bother with saying that Solomon was peer-reviewed: so was Piltdown Man. (Stephen J. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980 pages 108-124)
The content of Sienicki’s paper that was published was greatly watered down from the one that you originally referred to.
It is Sienicki’s that is challenging the accepted view and up to him to prove it. In my view he uses flawed assumptions, inappropriate methodology, and comes to incorrect conclusions.
To add to that I have read the publications of both and find one very compelling and the other something of a joke, I leave it to you to decide which is which.
Finaly I have a greater respect for the work of Dr Solomon a senior scientist at NOAA, than Sienicki someone with little or no history of publishing in the field, with a yahoo email address. That may not be fair but it is the case nonetheless.
Okay, I mesed up with citation for Piltdown Man in the last post (the citation talks about challenges to it), but the point remains that Piltdown Man’s challenges went ignored, even when raised in peer-reviewed journals, which should put their reliability in question. Again, quit shifting the goal posts: if you bother reading the notes, you’ll see that he hasn’t had to remove anything from the article I originally referred to (you seem to get really mixed up about his articles). It’s up to him to prove it, and he does. I haven’t seen you challenge anything specific from what he has written, while Sienicki and I have managed to do much better. In fact, you give the impression that you haven’t read past the abstract. (I know otherwise, but someone else reading what you have to say might not) Keep mindlessly attacking him without giving any support for your reasons, you’re destroying your credibility. If you find Solomon’s data selection, data dragging, and logical fallacies “very compelling”, you’re just one more sheeple who will believe anything if you see the word “science” in it. Ironically, by Fiennes’ (the guy you’re also shilling for) own logic, you are absolutely unqualified to talk about this (que made up qualification in your next post): he argued that the only person who could write about Scott was someone “who has experienced the deprivations, the stress and the sheer physical pain that Scott lived through. Fiennes has suffered all…” (Fiennes, Captain Scott, bookflap of first UK edition) That disqualifies you and Solomon at once.
Lets just agree to disagree
Very well.
It was a bit of lengthily back and forth, I hope it was followable, and maybe interesting.
I would recommend this paper by Carl Murry it is certainly of interest to anybody looking at the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/2627/1/01front.pdf
That’s just the front, here’s the whole version (warning: it’s large): http://eprints.utas.edu.au/2627/2/02whole.pdf
I wouldn’t trust Murray: he’s very slanted towards Scott and against Amundsen, and has a habit of being very selective with his quoting. One case of selective quoting that caught my eye was on page 3 of his article “The use and abuse of dogs on
Scott’s and Amundsen’s South Pole expeditions”, when he quotes Scott (Voyage of the “Discovery”, 1905, page 343). He left out two entire sentences which came after it, where Scott trumpets the virtues of man hauling, so devotion to man hauling would not appear to be a potential reason behind his reluctance to use dogs. Also, Murray makes no mention of Scott’s killing of puppies during the Discovery Expedition. Scott’s reason for killing them? “it was getting [to be] a positive nuisance to see so many of these wretched undersized little beasts for ever gorging themselves on the midden heap.” Huntford (1999), p. 174. I believe Huntford did provide a source for this statement in the 1979 edition) Sienicki lays out Murray’s issues with honesty in said article in the appendix of another article he wrote: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.5355
Ben, regarding Solomon’s “credibility”:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/12/the-wisdom-of-solomon/ Solomon against accurate measurement
http://climateaudit.org/2008/11/24/santer-and-the-4-noaa-coauthors/ Solomon doesn’t even have the data in the paper she co-authored
http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/24/solomons-divergence-problem/ Solomon won’t keep her story accurate
http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/24/noaa-misrepresents-inspector-general-report/ NOAA misrepresents the Inspector General’s report. Favorite comment: http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/24/noaa-misrepresents-inspector-general-report/#comment-256786
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/03/crowley-tries-to-get-data-from-jacoby/ Solomon coerces someone to try to prevent them from getting data
Also, as to why Solomon has never been challenged in a peer reviewed journal, odds are she has and the challenges have never been published. Ever heard of positive outcome bias? http://59ways.blogspot.com/2012/06/positive-outcome-bias.html
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/23/13012.full.pdf There’s Solomon’s offending article. Note Figure 3, where she represents all of Scott’s figures as daily minimums, whereas Scott’s temperatures from March 10 onward are daily midday near surface temperatures, and Simpson (Vol. I, page 20) states that the minimum temperature occurred around midnight. Solomon most likely realized how ridiculous midday temperatures of -40 F would look in March (imagine the minimums!), and thus to keep her claim together committed data dragging. Any “peer reviewed journal” which allows data dragging is not credible. In fact, a guy with a Yahoo email address writing an article for arXiv can be more credible than that.
Smoking gun for how Solomon’s article got into PNAS: http://occamstypewriter.org/stevecaplan/2011/10/23/peer-review-and-the-ole-boys-network/
“Consider this, though. There is another track–a relatively new track–that PNAS allows, that in my view is even worse than the NAS contributor mode: It’s called “Direct Submission.” What does this mean? It means that the authors have secured in advance a”pre-arranged editor”? Oh–that smacks of a Soviet era style “ole boys network.” Find an editor in advance–a friend, colleague, mentor, brother, sister–someone who will agree in advance to get the paper published. Have a look at this, again from the PNAS submission site:
Prior to submission to PNAS, an author may ask an NAS member to oversee the review process of a Direct Submission. Prearranged editors should only be used when an article falls into an area without broad representation in the Academy, or for research that may be considered counter to a prevailing view or too far ahead of its time to receive a fair hearing, and in which the member is expert. If the NAS member agrees, the author should coordinate submission to ensure that the member is available, and should alert the member that he or she will be contacted by the PNAS Office within 48 hours of submission to confirm his or her willingness to serve as a prearranged editor and to comment on the importance of the work.
Now this actually manages to get around not one, but two levels of review. After all, for the ordinary-person’s peer review track, the editorial board/editor generally rejects 75% of the incoming papers without their even reaching peer review. The “pre-arranged editor” trick circumnavigates the need to go through this initial triage selection process, and shunts the paper directly into press.
Pretty amazing, eh? All you have to say is that there isn’t enough general expertise on the board, or that the paper is–how do they put it? Here it is: Counter to a prevailing view or too far ahead of its time to receive a fair hearing. So if your paper is contrary to current views or “ahead of its time” (what the hell is that supposed to mean–and who decides this anyway?)–get a free pass. But the catch? You need to have a buddy on the editorial board. Otherwise, who will do this for you. You need to be part of the “ole boys network.”
Doesn’t everyone have a disclaimer these days? After all, you don’t want to be sued. There is a statement in the submission site that says the following:
“Papers with a prearranged editor are published with a footnote to that effect.”
Well, why not be more explicit? These papers are not peer reviewed and should be treated as such.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/23/13012.full.pdf There’s Solomon’s article. Look just above the preface, and you’ll find this: “Edited by James E. Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, and approved August 27, 1999 (received for review June 21, 1999)” Smoking gun for how Solomon got her poisoned science article in: she arranged for an editor to shoo it into publication in PNAS.