Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumAfter Denialist BS Slips Through Peer Review & Gets Yanked, Authors Whine About "Climate Activists"
Links at original.
Its not often that deniers just straight up tell you that the few things they do manage to slip into the peer-reviewed literature are garbage, but last week we saw exactly that. Activists, according to a NoTricksZone post by liar Kenneth Richard, reposted to WUWT, have gotten a paper retracted because it threatens climate alarm narratives. Oh no! What activists did this? What sort of campaign did they wage? How did they convince the publishing journal, History of Geo- and Space Sciences, to retract the paper?
Dont expect any actual answers. The best Richard can offer is that the journal only retracted the paper after likely receiving heavy criticism from climate activists. He doesnt point to any such criticism from any activists, because there doesnt appear to have been any. In fact, the only chatter about it seems relegated to a couple of mocking responses to a Judith Curry tweet calling it a very interesting and provocative new paper. Actual climate scientist Gavid Schmidt referred to the study, which claims that carbon dioxide and methane do not cause warming, as obvious and pre-debunked nonsense, while glaciologist Eric Steig joked that as an ice core specialist he could find 538 things wrong with it in about five minutes.
The most robust response though by far, was a lengthy twitter thread by John Mashey that called out some very
um
interesting aspects of the study, for example that the pre-publication reviewers included deniers like Richard Lindzen and Martin Hovland, a longtime petroleum industry employee, while an editor at the journal has a history of climate denial. But Gavin got 38 retweets, Eric got 2, and John 14. Not exactly a social media mob of activists demanding a retraction!
EDIT
Yes, in a nutshell, another reviewer wrote, Prof. Richet would like us to believe that simply by eyeballing a graph of CO2 and methane levels against Antarctic temperatures, he can see what generations of scientists before him have failed to understand, namely that carbon dioxide has played little or no role in Earth temperature variations over the last 423kyr. Our favorite critique though, was the confession that the reviewer has probably never read a scientific paper of such low quality as it looks like a strongly biased political indictment that relies on a plethora of historical impossibilities and without any knowledge of the most basic concepts of climatology. The reviewer concluded that they are surprised that the author, who is so keen on discussing scientific rigour, can make such beginners mistakes. The journal though, to its credit, seems eager to learn from those mistakes, and appears to have dropped the author and the editor who handled the paper from its Editorial Board.
EDIT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/4/2055997/-Deniers-Blame-Alarmists-for-Journal-Retraction-of-Deeply-Flawed-Pal-Reviewed-Paper#view-story
jpak
(41,757 posts)POS
hatrack
(59,583 posts)EDIT
Review of The temperatureCO2 climate connection: an epistemological reappraisal of ice-core messages by Pascal Richet
First, I must confess I have probably never read a scientific paper of such low quality,
and I am appalled that it was published in an international scientific journal. The paper
looks more like a strongly biased political indictment against climate science, using a plethora of historical impossibilities and without any knowledge of the most basic concepts in climatology. According to usual scientific standards, this paper should certainly not have been published and I suspect there was no climate scientist in the former review process.
EDIT
Other major comments
the synchonicity of the episodes of warming and cooling... between Greenland and
Antarctica... » I do not understand this statement, since it is well established that Greenland and Antarctica are NOT synchronous. This is precisely the subject of a vast literature in climate sciences over the last 30 years. Either the author has missed these previous studies on ice core, something difficult to imagine since they are mentioned in many papers. Or the author tries to fit the data to his own simplistic pre-conceptions of the system, that past temperature changes are global (they are not) and that the Northern hemisphere and the southern ones have a similar pattern (they have not) forced by a single global insolation (which is known since the 19th century to have no climate impact). In any case, this sentence alone is not acceptable in a serious scientific paper about ice cores, since it contradicts decades of observational data.
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(3) Some references are unreliable or inappropriate. Two references (Allmendinger 2017 and Nikolov and Zeller 2017) are published in Environ. Polllut. Climate Change.
Environment Pollution and Climate Change is published OMICS Publishing Group, which is suspected of being a Predatory Publishing. In fact, Nikolov and Zeller (2017) is based on a finding of Volokin and Rellez (2014). Volokin and Rellez are names spelled backwards Nikolov and Zeller. I found a related news article. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/19/scientists-
published-climate-research-under-fake-names-then-they-were-caught/ Petit (2013) is just an interview article in a French website. Without special reasons,
this is not suitable for a reference of peer review journal.
EDIT
https://www.history-of-geo-and-space-sciences.net/2021-08-30_hgss-2021-1_referee-reports-merged.pdf
ugh