After Denialist BS Slips Through Peer Review & Gets Yanked, Authors Whine About "Climate Activists" [View all]

[hatrack]

Links at original.

It’s 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?

Don’t 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 doesn’t point to any such criticism from any activists, because there doesn’t 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 beginner’s 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