My sincere thanks to everyone who has provided widespread review of our draft paper. There have been hundreds of suggestions and corrections submitted in comments and in email, and for that I am very grateful. That sort of input is exactly what we hoped for, and such input can only make the paper better, and so far it has.

Edits are being made based on many of those suggestions. My sincere thanks go to WUWT moderator Bob Phelan for help in collating the online comments to remove duplicates and group comments and corrections by category. Using that, I’m hoping to post up a revised draft, addressing many of those comments and corrections in the next day or two. I had hoped to have an update ready today, but the editing is taking more time than I thought initially. I will likely create a separate dedicated page for Watts et al 2012 so that it gets separated from the press release, and can be managed better.

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in Watts et al. 2012 that was placed online for review. We thank critics, including Zeke Hausfather and Steve Mosher for bringing that to attention. Particular thanks go to Zeke who has been helpful with emailed suggestions. Thanks also go to Dr. Leif Svalgaard, who has emailed helpful suggestions.

The authors are performing detailed reanalysis of the data for the Watts et al. 2012 paper and will submit a revised paper to a journal as soon as possible, and barring any new issues discovered, that will likely happen before the end of September.

The idea of online pre-peer review, and likely peer review itself, is in my opinion where the future of science publishing lies. I think we’ll all learn useful lessons for that future from this experiment. As the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

My sincerest thanks to everyone for their input and consideration.

Look for future updates, along with some technical discussions as we proceed.

UPDATE: A work page has been established for Watts et al 2012 for the purpose of managing updates. You can view it here.

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