🚨 The Top Five Climate Science Scandals 🚨
By Roger Pielke Jr.

Part 1.....

Science is science because it is self-correcting. That means that when researchers go down a dead end path they turn around and look for another route. However, science in highly politicized situations can face obstacles to self-correction, meaning that it can be more difficult to change course when science gets off track. This is especially so when bad science becomes politically important.

That’s where climate science finds itself in 2024. Long time readers here at THB will know that climate change is real and poses risks. At the same time, the climate science community appears to have lost its collective ability to call out bad science and get things back on track. Today, particularly for the many new readers that THB has gained this year, I summarize the top 5 climate science scandals covered here at THB over the past few years.

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. 

Let’s jump right in . . .

(5) The Interns Made a “Dataset” and We Used it for Research

Who can forget the devastating 1974 hurricane? Example of a fictional disaster in a fictional “dataset." 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.

The IPCC AR6 and US NCA had more than 60 peer-reviewed studies (listed above) that it could have cited on the detection and attribution of trends in normalized losses related to extreme weather around the world. Guess which one they chose to promote? The one with the fake data.


Read on for scandals 4 to 1 🧵...
Part 2.....

(4) 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 (rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/think-of-the…) and here (rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-alimonti…)

Read on for 3 to 1.....🧵