“Skeptic paper on Antarctica accepted – rebuts Steig et al“. “Hah!” says Anthony Watts. A skeptic has a paper into a real journal! Of course there were many review comments that were “difficult”, but they overcame the alleged resistance of the nasty “Team”!
So what new knowledge have these intrepid skeptics uncovered? Well, nothing. They’re just trying to critique a paper in Nature that showed that Antarctica has warmed (Steig et al, Nature, 2009). They report that yeah Antarctica has warmed, but it’s not quite as uniform as Steig determined. With Steven McIntyre as a co-author, as well as fellow ‘citizen-scientist’ Jeff Condon, I suspect that this will prove another exercise in sour-minded nit-picking resulting in a conclusion that ‘they could have used a slightly better statistical method’.
Such rebuttals are usually in the original journal for reasons of clarity, but this particular attack will be in the Journal of Climate.
Statistical fiddling changes... what? After O'Donnell, 2010
What do we see in the abstract? Admissions that Steig 2009 “has merit”. Allusions to “suboptimal determination”. Reluctant references to “negligible differences”.
Oh here’s Anthony’s killer rebuttal of Steig! “I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement.”
That’s the problem with peer-review. Your accusations have to stand up to scrutiny before they are published. Or get restated honestly. Unlike denialist websites like Anthony Watts’.
Wott's Up With That? 
Couldn’t resist posting something similar on the CA thread, but all this stuff about “oh isn’t it hard to get published” and insinuations of “pal reviewers in the Team” look a bit silly when the not-all-that-skeptic paper in question got accepted in 10 months, about the same as Steig’s (well, maybe even a bit quicker).
Who said doing – and publishing – science is easy??
[The denialist self-described obstacles are always amusing. – Ben]
So they published a paper that says the Antarctic peninsula is warming, like, really fast. Did anyone in the comments at Watts note that the peninsula could contribute like 5-7 meters of sea level rise? And that this warming could be really bad short term (100 years or so…and correct me if my numbers are off a bit)?
Ah, more of the simple equation “2-1+1=2”, I see!
As, for the magazine in question, I expect the editor in chief, will be inundated and well roasted by a wide variety of readers letters! Most if not all, will be stating the obvious, pointing out all the howlers and mathematical flaws and then followed up with quite a few subscription cancellations!
Let the roasting begin!