The Top Five Climate Science Scandals - Highlighted Article

From: The Honest Broker - Substack

By: Roger Pielke Jr.

Date: August 12, 2024

The Top Five Climate Science Scandals

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

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. (continue reading)

The Top Five Climate Science Scandals