From CLIMATE DEPOT
By Marc Morano
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-top-five-climate-science-scandals
Excerpt:
By Roger Pielke Jr.: I define a scandal as a situation of objectively flawed science — in substance and/or procedure — that the community has been unable to make right, but should. …
The Alimonti Retraction for an Unpopular View
The science community has shown a willingness to retract a climate science paper — in this case not for being wrong in any substantive way, but instead for expressing views that are politically unhelpful. In 2022, a group of Italian scientists published a paper that summarized the IPCC’s conclusions on extreme weather trends, consistent with what you’ve been reading here at THB. The paper broke no new ground but was a useful review to have in the literature. Even so, several activist journalists and scientists demanded that it be retracted — and, remarkably, the Springer Nature journal that published the paper obliged. I heard from a whistleblower who shared all of the sordid details, where you can read about here and here.
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The Interns Made a “Dataset” and We Used it for Research
I have recently documented how the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — supposedly one of the top science journals — published a paper using a “dataset” cobbled together by some interns for marketing a now-defunct insurance company. There is actually no such dataset out in the real world — it is a fiction. The paper is the only normalization study purporting to identify a signal of human-caused climate change in disaster losses and thus has been highlighted by both the IPCC and U.S. National Climate Assessment. That context makes its correction or retraction politically problematic. When I informed PNAS about the fake dataset they refused to look at it and stood behind the paper. Read about the backstory and how PNAS stonewalled any reconsideration.
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- A Love Affair with Extreme Emissions Scenarios
The top of the table won’t be a surprise to longtime readers of THB. Extreme emissions scenarios that map out implausible and even apocalyptic futures are a favorite in climate research and assessment. This space continues to be dominated by a scenario called RCP8.5 — which has coal consumption increasing more than 10x by 2100 (see figure above and all credit to my colleague Justin Ritchie). However, as the community comes to accept the ridiculousness of RCP8.5, efforts are being made to replace it with another extreme scenario — Right now that appears to be SSP3-7.0 which also foresees a massive increase in coal (~6x) and a world of about 13 billion people in 2100, far more than projected by the United Nations.
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- A Major Error in the IPCC
The IPCC is a massive effort, and if it did not exist we’d have to invent it. It is not surprising that a few mistakes can creep into the assessment. What matters is what happens when mistakes are made. I identified a major error in the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report involving confusion over hurricane intensities — It was a simple error having to do with technical terminology that was misunderstood (hurricane fixes, i.e., measurements — became reinterpreted as hurricanes).
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