Free speech is under attack in the politicised world of climate science and disgust at the recent cancellation of Alimonti et al. by Springer Nature continues to grow. Readers will recall that the paper written by four Italian scientists led by Physics Professor Gianluca Alimonti said past data did not point to a “climate crisis”. It was retracted on August 23rd, 20 months after initial publication, following a concerted campaign by activist journalists and scientists. Science writer Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., who first published a number of whistle-blower emails about a Springer inquiry, has returned to the fray, noting: “We should not be in a situation where activist journalists, many funded by billionaires, enlist activist scientists to demand retraction of a science article and then the world’s arguably leading scientific publisher meekly obeys. We must do better.”
Francis Menton writes the widely-read Manhattan Contrarian and he recently noted that free speech today is under assault from the Left all the time. He used the Alimonti affair as an example of this crackdown on dissent.
If you wonder why the climate alarm narrative seems so completely to dominate public discussion (even though it is utter nonsense), then you need to understand that there is an orthodoxy enforcement police operating behind the scenes. Most of the time the operation of this orthodoxy enforcement mechanism is invisible to the general public. Climate sceptics can’t get jobs in academia, and go into other careers; when sceptics write papers, they get rejected and are never heard of again. But every once in a while something happens to bring aspects of the orthodoxy enforcement mechanism momentarily into the open. That has recently occurred with respect to a paper published in a European scientific journal in early 2022.
Again regular readers will recall that the paper attracted little comment until September last year when the Daily Sceptic covered the findings in an article that attracted 9,000 retweets. Following subsequent coverage in the Australian and Sky Australia, the Guardian and state-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) launched counterattacks. AFP ‘Herald of the Anthropocene’ Marlowe Hood said the data were “grossly manipulated” and “fundamentally flawed”. They were soon joined by a number of activist scientists including Michael Mann who sneered at his fellow academics, dismissing them as “nuclear physics dudes in Italy” from “totally unrelated fields”.
In Pielke’s latest contribution, he says it is his “strong opinion” that the sole reason to retract the paper is not to do with the analysis of the data, but the one sentence that reads: “In conclusion on the basis of observation data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
The joy of the successful activists appears unconfined. Marlowe Hood recently collected £88,000 from the foundation of the green technology supporting BBVA bank. He tweeted: “It may be akin to removing a speck of dust from a rubbish heap, but I confess to taking satisfaction in seeing this egregiously bad climate study retracted. The remaining question, of course, is how it got into a Springer Nature journal to start with.”
For its part, BBVA justified its recent large payment to Hood by noting “his ability to synthesise complex scientific models and studies and explain them in simple terms”.
The final Springer retraction notice did not detail any substantive issue with the Alimonti paper, writes Pielke, only vaguely refering to the Guardian and AFP articles in the passive voice — “concerns were raised”. The journal’s year-long attempt to review the paper was “apparently invented as they went along”.
Dr. Pielke is evidently an old-school science academic and he has a mild criticism about editorialising by using the term “climate crisis”. Whether there is a climate crisis is a political judgement and not one that emerges from data and evidence. But he goes on to note that anyone familiar with peer-reviewed literature knows that editorialising is common, and in the climate literature, “absolutely pervasive”. In fact, he conducted a review of Google Scholar and found more than 300,000 papers that assert a “climate crisis”. A minor editorial comment by the Alimonti authors that passed through peer review, he observes, is no way a justification for a retraction. In his view it is one of the “most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen”.
Meanwhile, another academic whistle-blower has cast further shocking light on the policing methods that evidently lie behind much climate science publishing. As the Daily Sceptic noted on Tuesday, Dr. Patrick Brown of John Hopkins University said he wrote a new paper on California wildfires in Nature according to the approved script in order to get it published. This of course involved boosting the role of ‘climate change’ and downplaying natural causes and the increasing role played by arsonists. He said he has learnt that there is a formula for success in getting papers published in high profile journals such as Nature and Science. “Unfortunately, the formula is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating knowledge for society,” he said. This formula, added Brown, distorts a great deal of climate science research, and misinforms the public.
Francis Menton highlights Pielke’s finding that 300,000 science papers assert the existence of a climate crisis. “A few hundred billion dollars of Government money can buy a lot of fake climate alarmism,” he concludes.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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