Jaworowski’s 1994 review article in ESPR

Locating this article was a bit of an adventure. During the discussion on Deltoid of Jawarowski’s 2004 statement, the subject of Jaworowski’s publication history (or lack thereof) in peer-reviewed journals came up. Environmental Science and Pollution Research is one such, so it seemed reasonable to look for the Jaworowski paper on ESPR’s web page. You’ll note that the paper is the cover article, and is available for free through the web page. Well, it wasn’t there then. In fact, Dano looked for a copy and found it missing. Now, I was curious. I looked in the library catalogues of the University of Colorado and of NCAR; neither carried the journal. I searched the Web, and found that ESPR is a difficult journal to find anywhere. The National Library of Medicine carries the journal, but doesn’t have issues (2) – (4) in Volume 1.

Now I was obsessed.

As luck would have it, business was taking me to Washington, D.C. the following week. I took a couple of hours to go to the Library of Congress, get photographed for a reader’s card by the nice people there, and mosey on over to the stacks. Guess which issue was missing from the archives? Aaaargh!

Fate, though playful, was not malicious. When I ordered 1 ESPR (3) 1994 from the LoC stacks, I also ordered the next three issues, to see if there had been any response to the Jaworowski article. As it turned out, there had been. No less an authority than Prof. Hans Oeschger had written a lengthy critique (if that’s the word) in 2 ESPR (1), pp. 60-61, about which more later.

So, I’d come up dry at all the usual sources. Now I did what I should have done in the first place; I e-mailed ESPR and ordered a copy.
Susanne at ESPR replied “Thank you for your order. I have a little problem. You wish to buy the article from Vol. 1 but there is no page 161-171.” I pointed out that the article was on the cover of 1 ESPR (3), and had been referred to in a letter to the Editors in 2 ESPR (1).
Susanne got back to me the next day: “Please see enclosed the pdf-file free of charge because the quality is bad.” Aha! Now, I finally had my hooks on the object of my quest. As sometimes happens with quests, though, once the fair guerdon I had hoped to find was in my hands, it was a bit of a let-down.
Ancient Atmosphere — Validity of Ice Records is little more than a rehash of the much longer article by Jaworowski, Segalstad and Ono in The Science of the Total Environment 114 227-284 (1992). The figures, the vague theories of unspecified physical and chemical processes, and the tendentious interpretations of the existing research are all repeated from Jaworowski et al. 1992. Since I have already spent more time on that paper than I wanted to, I will leave the review of this one to Hans Oeschger.
Prof. Oeschger, with a lifetime’s distinguished history of actually doing climate research, may have been the very best person to comment on Jaworowski’s paper. In his letter, Oeschger very calmly points out in great detail that Jaworowski does not know what he is talking about.

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