The State Of Climate 'Science': The Guardian Gets A Paper Retracted Which Proves The Non Existence Of The Extreme Weather Climate Crisis They INVENTED In 2019

It’s hard to believe what’s going on in climate ‘science’ nowadays, but believe it we must, because it looks like it might get worse as the zealots increase their stranglehold over the preferred narrative in order to drive through the ‘sustainability’ agenda set by the globalist elite. Medical ‘science’ is not much better either. Roger Pielke Jr. published this post yesterday:

"Think of the Implications of Publishing"

I have been contacted by a whistleblower with a remarkable story of corruption of the academic peer-review process involving a paper published in 2022. The whistleblower has provided me with relevant emails, reviews and internal deliberations from which I recount this disturbing episode — which ends with an unwarranted and politically-motivated retraction of a paper that some climate scientists happened to disagree with.

To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement.  Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.

The abuse of the peer review process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicized as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes.

It took me a while to realise that the study in question is the one I wrote about here in September 2022:

In that post I stated:

The Guardian really put the ball in motion in 2019 when their editorial department decided that ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ were too tame to communicate a supposed existential crisis facing humanity, so they adopted the ‘more scientific’ terms ‘climate breakdown’, ‘climate emergency’, ‘climate emergency’ and ‘global heating’ instead.

So basically, a left wing rag not known for reporting facts invented the ‘climate crisis’ three years ago, seeing as how it’s become common parlance ever since. No matter that there is no solid, scientific, empirical, observational evidence or data to lend support to this ideological notion of a climate in crisis; they decided that they would try and manufacture that proof of the pudding as they went along. For example, by labelling every extreme weather event as ‘proof’ of catastrophic global warming in real-time, regardless of whether their dodgy scientific models combined with observations actually demonstrated it or not, e.g. the recent floods in Pakistan:

Here We Go Again! Pakistan Floods Nothingburger 'Attribution' Study Hyped by the BBC and its Warmist Lead Author

The BBC and the Guardian have been hard at it ever since, plugging every extreme weather event as evidence of a ‘climate crisis’, particularly heatwaves, floods and droughts. The paper in question carefully summed up the observational evidence for allegedly dramatic increases in frequency and severity of weather events and basically came to the conclusion that there is no scientific evidence of a happening ‘climate crisis’.

When Sky News Australia publicised this paper’s findings, the Guardian decided that it was an existential threat to their imaginary existential ‘climate crisis’ which they single-handedly popularised in 2019. Something had to be done. So they did something. They initiated a campaign targeting Springer, the publisher, to get the paper retracted, enlisting the help of activist climate ‘scientists’.

Pielke says:

Following its publication, the paper was discussed a bit on several blogs but did not get much attention (I Tweeted on it at the time). Then, eight months later following some discussion of the paper in the Australian media, The Guardian wrote an article severely criticizing the paper. The Guardian quoted four scientists critical of the paper: Greg Holland, Lisa Alexander, Steve Sherwood, and Michael Mann.

Michael Mann was scathing and personal in his comments:

“another example of scientists from totally unrelated fields coming in and naively 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.”

Less than a week later, the AFP followed up with an article also critical of the paper, with the headline, “Scientists urge top publisher to withdraw faulty climate study.”

The AFP quoted two scientists calling for the paper to be retracted by Springer Nature. One was Friederike Otto, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, who stated:

"They are writing this article in bad faith. If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should not have been published."

The other scientist calling for the paper’s retraction was Stefan Rahmstorf, Head of Earth Systems at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who stated,

"I do not know this journal, but if it is a self-respecting one it should withdraw the article"

In a long and convoluted series of emails between publishers and authors, it was eventually decided by Springer that they would retract the paper, for no good reason other than that activist climate scientists didn’t like the sound conclusions which the paper arrived at by examining the actual data. The involvement of Otto is significant. I have criticised her ‘extreme weather attribution’ outfit regularly on this Substack. Here for instance:

But the really shocking thing here is that a left wing rag specialising in the dissemination of climate misinformation and disinformation in order to promote global eco-communism has managed to get a scientific study retracted which contradicts the narrative they have crafted so carefully and painstakingly over the years. Climategate 2.0 - The Sequel is very much alive in 2023, 14 years after Climategate 1.0 shook the scientific establishment.