Shocking details of corruption and suppression in the world of peer-reviewed climate science have come to light with a recent leak of emails. They show how a determined group of activist scientists and journalists combined to secure the retraction of a paper that said a climate emergency was not supported by the available data. Science writer and economist Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has published the startling emails and concludes: “Shenanigans continue in climate science, with influential scientists teaming up with journalists to corrupt peer review.”
The offending paper was published in January 2022 in a Springer Nature journal and at first attracted little attention. But on September 14th the Daily Sceptic covered its main conclusions and as a result it went viral on social media with around 9,000 Twitter retweets. The story was then covered by both the Australian and Sky News Australia. The Guardian activist Graham Readfearn, along with state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP), then launched counterattacks. AFP ‘Herald of the Anthropocene’ Marlowe Hood said the data were “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”.
After nearly a year of lobbying, Springer Nature has retracted the popular article. In the light of concerns, the Editor-in-Chief is said to no longer have confidence in the results and conclusion reported in the paper. The authors were invited to submit an addendum but this was “not considered suitable for publication”. The leaked emails show that the addendum was sent for review to four people, and only one objected to publication.
What is shocking about this censorship is that the paper was produced by four distinguished scientists, including three professors of physics, and was heavily based on data used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The lead author was Professor Gianluca Alimonti of Milan University and senior researcher of Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics. Their paper reviewed the available data, but refused to be drawn into the usual mainstream narrative that catastrophises cherry-picked weather trends. During the course of their work, the scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world, and the same was true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed no “clear positive trend of extreme events”. In addition, the scientists noted considerable growth of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In fact this scandal has started to attract comparison with the Climategate leaks of 2009 that also displayed considerable contempt for the peer-review process. One of the co-compilers of the Met Office’s HadCRUT global temperature database Dr. Phil Jones emailed Michael Mann, author of the infamous temperature ‘hockey stick’, stating: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!”
Interestingly, Professor Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, has a part to play in this latest de-platforming exercise. In the Guardian attack article he said it was another example of scientists from “totally unrelated fields” coming in and naïvely applying inappropriate methods to data they don’t understand. “Either the consensus of the world’s climate experts that climate change is causing a very clear increase in many types of weather extremes is wrong, or a couple of nuclear physics dudes in Italy are wrong,” he said.
It was an AFP ‘fact-check’ attack, published soon after the Daily Sceptic article, that brought other activist scientists into the campaign to retract the offending science paper. It was part-written by Marlowe Hood, whom regular readers will recall was recently given about £88,000 by the Foundation arm of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in financing green technologies. One of the experts quoted by AFP was Dr. Freiderike Otto, who works in the pseudoscience field trying to ‘attribute’ single weather events to long-term changes in the climate using computer models. She is helped in this work by funding from the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Otto said the authors of the report were “of course” not writing their paper in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should never have been published.”
Another scientist calling for the work to be cancelled was Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth Systems at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He told AFP that he did not know of the Springer journal, “but if it is a self-respecting one it should withdraw the article”.
The leaked Pielke emails provide a fascinating insight into the way Springer Nature dealt with the issue over the last year. At first there was concern that Alimonti et al. only referenced the work of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, although it was pointed out that when the paper was originally submitted the IPCC sixth assessment had not been published. It was suggested an ‘erratum’ should be compiled. Professor Alimonti took the understandable view that an ‘addendum’ was more appropriate.
The addenda were prepared and then sent out for review to four people and an adjudicator. Three reviewers recommended publication and one was against. The adjudicator was then reported to have sided with the minority view. One of the reviewers recommended acceptance by noting: “The statements made by the authors are generally in agreement with the assessment produced by the working group 1 of the IPCC on their Sixth Assessment Report.” Another reviewer wrote: “The original article is a straightforward recitation of credible, key data about several types of extreme weather events. I find nothing selective, biased or misleading in what they present. While there’s hardly anything written that isn’t well known to experts, it’s useful for non-experts to see the underlying data, which are most often obscure in the IPCC reports.”
But all to no avail. The adjudicator agreed with the one dissenting voice that the addendum did not meet the “scientific standards” that would allow for publication. “Furthermore, I recommend retraction of the original manuscript.” The article was subsequently retracted, although a new version has been republished here.
Dr. Pielke’s conclusions are damning. “The abuse of the peer-reviewed process documented here is remarkable, and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicised as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open, and behind the scenes.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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The usual grant whores protecting their grubby fiefdom.
Correct, those who pay the pipers pick the tune!
The only scientists who can be trusted in climate research are those without a financial interest,such as physicists.
They know how to analyse data,but receive no grants or sponsorship for doing so.
Climate Science has destroyed itself at the behest of oligarchs.
Isn’t “climate science” just an ideological movement, an offshoot of the environmental movement that has attracted the most extreme greeny marxists?
In Memoriam.
Science 1620-2020.
She was in apparent good health until gangrene set in to a small wound caused by government funding in the minor field of meteorology. She was a handmaiden to all who sought truth, and she will be sorely missed.
Indeed! Welcome to the New 16th century!!
The government’s ‘science finder general’ will tell you what he ‘believes’ is true and you’d better agree with it or you’ll soon find yourself tied to the stake of cancellation with the flames of msm growing around your feet!
True – but it’s worth remembering that Francis Bacon, as Lord Chancellor and Solicitor General, personally formulated bills for the prosecution of witchcraft.
Magic was a very strong element within science for about a century after Bacon.
It still is.
Big Bang magic.
Evolutionary magic.
Rona virus magic.
Trillions of years magic.
Bullshit, bafflegab, money. $cientism.
“We own The Science.”
It would appear that the most outstanding achievement of climate science is to turn the term climate science into an oxymoron.
To modify the quote of Hanns Johst: “When I hear the words climate science, I release the safety catch on my Browning.”
Follow the money!
We are entering the age of the Climate Inquisition.
Listen to the insidious Michael Mann trying to play the Argument from Authority card again. —–Back when his Hockey Stick Graph was all over IPCC reports, the BBC, The Independent and the Guardian and every other Liberal Progressive pretend to save the planet publication or TV Channel, he was the Global Warming darling. ——-But then along came Steve McIntyre. ———McIntyre wanted Manns methodology, data and computer code so he could check the graph that allegedly showed a sharp upward warming trend in the 20th century after 1000 years of stable temperature. —-That information was not forthcoming. Mann would not provide it.—- In science isn’t it the case that results have to be reproducible? Other people should be able to do experiments or check data etc for themselves, otherwise how will science ever move forward, and things that are wrong be dismissed? But McIntyre, like a dog with a bone would not be brushed off so easily and eventually after 5 years exposed the Mann Hockey Stick as JUNK and statistically wrong. It soon vanished from IPCC reports, and from Mainstream News —–Science is NOT a dictatorship where agenda driven official science determines truth and tries to prevent it being questioned. Hundreds of years ago Galileo was put under house arrest for daring to question the authority of the church. Today you get the feeling that climate officialdom would do the same to all the “deniers” if they could get away with it. ———Or as Mark Twain put it —-“It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know just ain’t so”.
I’m not sure if you have deliberately tweaked Twain’s quote to make a different point, but his actual quote is as follows:
“what gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so”
Does the tiny difference matter?
Clive you are correct. It does not matter, which means Michael is using the fact I got a word wrong to detract from the overall comments I made.
And it looks like he has gave you a thumbs down for pointing that out.
No deliberate tweaking. I made the quote from memory. I have checked it and you are correct. ——It makes no difference to the points I made though, as it was only an anecdote I thought was funny after my more serious comments, which so far you have neglected to pass comment on. —–Is that deliberate?
Those of us how ploughed through the ClimateGate emails know that know that a prime aim of the Climate Thugs (led by the Mann Gang) was to in effect, capture “peer review” so that only articles they approved of evert got published.
Here ya go. Treat yourself…
https://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf
“Mann immediately suggests black-balling the journal that dared to challenge their authority: So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…”
and so on…
In the abstract of the paper in question (the only part of it in front of an expensive paywall) it mentions that the study used “piecewise regression analysis” to come to its conclusions. Traditional, or linear regression analysis assumes the relationship between the independent variable (in this case time) and the dependent variable (frequency of natural disasters) remains constant through the data range and predicts future outcomes based on a linear relationship.
Piecewise regression analysis, on the other hand, models the relationship between variables using different segments, separated by “breakpoints” to reflect that the relationship between variables (time and frequency of events) may change over time. To me, it is quite obvious that the latter approach is much more realistic when modelling climate change, as we know for a fact that climate change is anything but linear.
Secondly, the abstract notes a simultaneous patten of breakpoints, culminating in a downward trend since ~2000, in geophysical events such as volcanoes, earthquakes and dry landslides, contemporaneous with the changes in (so called) climate-related disasters. Taken together, as also pointed out in the abstract, there is one obvious candidate that stands out above all others as a culprit for changes in reported climate events: The reporting rate! As it states “…the patterns observed are largely attributable to progressively better reporting of natural disaster events, with the EM-DAT dataset now regarded as relatively complete since ~2000.
So there you have it – an incomplete but improving dataset prior to 2000 showing “increasing” natural disasters… and a complete dataset post-2000 showing decreasing natural disasters! Oh sorry, I forgot – the world’s on fire, isn’t it?
No Climate Emergency Science Paper Censored because they know there is no climate emergency. There is clearly a freedom emergency.
CLIMATE CHANGE CRA*P is Communist China’s most successful war psyop against the West which they have been driving since the 1980’s. They can’t believe their luck how many Useful Idiots in the west have embraced the scare stories and regurgitated them.
China is very happy that we have an army of scientific idiots who can be bought to deliver distorted, fiddled and lying data to support the false climate emergency which allows them to increase their coal, oil and gas generators, continue with their polluting manufacture, which would not be permitted in the west. Its time we realised that exporting our pollution by buying goods from counties without the restrictions we impose is not reducing pollution. Every import should have its generated pollution included in the importing countries value. Then we should really see how much by making it impossible through environmental restrictions to manufacture here, but which are ignored by places like India and China, we are really reducing the pollution we are responsible for.
The Globalists can only keep the “Climate Crisis” and Net Zero lunacy on track by silencing the opposition: just like they did with the Covid lies.
Unfortunately, a majority of people in the west have been so brainwashed by 20+ years of relentless propaganda, that it will be impossible to persuade them that the “climate crisis” only exists in computer models.
What will – eventually – wake them up is when they are forced to pay the astronomical bills for Net Zero and their quality of life is being dismantled.
Look at the face on Mann——-Even his grandmother would not trust a word that came out of that mouth. And once his grandmother had spoken to Steve McIntyre she would trust him even less.
Follow the money! Over 97% of climate scientists would be unemployed if there was no climate crisis.