From Watts Up With That?
Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen — 13 September 2023
The reputation of the entire scientific enterprise has been sullied by the recent scandal regarding a paper whose opinions so offended the ClimateGate Gang that they, the climate bullies, pressured one on the world’s leading publishers of scientific journals to retract a peer-reviewed paper – not because it was wrong; not because it was methodologically unsound; not because other researchers countered the paper with scientific arguments – no, simply because “some people didn’t like the conclusions” in the paper. Those offended, the ClimateGate gang, appearing in this round of scandal are Greg Holland ; Lisa Alexander ; Steve Sherwood ; Michael Mann ; Friederike Otto ; Stefan Rahmstorf, took their tears of outrage to the climate-collusion mass media and cried: “How dare they disagree with us!”
Springer/Nature’s editors and publishers shamefully caved in to the pressure and retracted the paper after a messy and irregular additional review.
[ Why is this essay titled “The Wolf and the Lamb”? The explanation is at the end. ]
The whole story has been previously covered here at WUWT over time:
A Critical Assessment of Extreme Events Trends in Times of Global Warming
Team Climate Crisis Resorts to Bullying, Again
The Climategate Gang Rides Again! (see the update at the end)
Roger Pielke Jr. concurrently ran coverage at his substack site:
“Think of the Implications of Publishing”
THREAD: Extended peer review of the “No Climate Emergency” paper. Should it be retracted?
During this time, I have been communicating with Gianluca Alimonti, lead author, about the retraction attempt (at first) and the final retraction by Springer. Alimonti et al. writes today: “We, the four authors, have just written a report that clarifies the whole issue.”
The entire document (hereafter ‘Brief History’) is available from the WUWT servers as a .pdf at the above link.
Please be aware that English is not the author’s first language, they speak and write Italian, so some of the sentence structures and word choices read a little uncomfortably.
Here are some excerpts from the Brief History document::
Since Alimonti et al. 2022 deals with the concept of a “climate emergency”, their Brief History includes a helpful definitional footnote:
“1 This is what IPCC AR6 says on the climate crisis: “Also, some media outlets have recently adopted and promoted terms and phrases stronger than the more neutral ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, including ‘climate crisis’, ‘global heating’, and ‘climate emergency’. Google searches on those terms, and on ‘climate action’, increased 20-fold in 2019, when large social movements such as School Strikes for Climate gained worldwide attention” [p. 173].”
The chronology begins with:
“1. 30 Sep. 2022: approximately nine months after the publication of our article in the international scientific journal EPJ Plus (European Physical Journal – Plus), which took place after having passed a regular peer review process, in September 2022 the article was placed “under dispute” (with a message of caution to readers reported on the EPJ-Plus website), on the base of personal opinions expressed by some scientists to a journalist of The Guardian newspaper – (which constitutes a rather anomalous procedure in the scientific field)” .
Then onto:
“6) including the original article reviewer, two out of three reviewers (but Prof. Pielke in his reconstruction of the story carried out on the basis of information received from a whistleblower – see the links at the bottom of this document – speaks of four reviewers out of five…) expressed a positive evaluation. Despite the majority of positive evaluations, an adjudicator has been contacted and with what we believe is a very weak and cherry picked analysis on our original article (although we had agreed that there would have been no other revisions of the original article) he/she recommended not to publish the Addendum and to retract our original article.”
And lastly, I’ll add:
“7) 13 July 2023: on the base of the evaluation of the adjudicator who, as written in his/her report, “has not been asked to comment on the original paper” (“excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta” would be natural to say…) the Editor wrote us on July the 13th that, after an in-depth consultation with the Publisher, not only our Addendum would not have been published but also that our original article would have been retracted. (and here we ask ourselves what qualification the publisher had to enter into this decision-making process)”
For the Latin-handicapped (such as I) “[Excusatio non petita accusatio manifesta (An unprovoked excuse is an obvious accusation)]” – [ source – as a title to a paper at NIH ]
As part of their comment on the retraction notice:
“Note that our conclusions are in perfect agreement with what emerges from Tab 12.12 of IPCC AR6 (attached) which summarizes the variations in the extreme events already observable today or which, according to IPCC forecasts, will become observable in the near future (between now and 2050 and between 2050 and 2100), obtained using a very drastic scenario, today considered unrealistic (RCP 8.5). In the table, the prevalence of white areas where significant confidence in the direction of change does not exist today and in many cases should not emerge even by 2100, stands out and all the extreme events considered in our article are in agreement with this IPCC table.“
The table being referred to here is:
Most of you will be familiar with this table from IPCC AR6. Pielke Jr. has expounded on this table and its relation to the much-touted Climate Emergency.
Alimonti and his co-authors conclude with this:
“Conclusions In conclusion, we observe that the moral of the story is found in the ending of “The Wolf and the Lamb”, the famous fairy tale by Phaedrus: “Lupus et agnus ad eundem rivum venerant… superior stabat lupus, longeque inferior agnus.… Atque ita correptum lacerat iniusta nece. Haec propter illos scripta est homines fabula qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt.”
The Latin is tricky to translate with an online translator, which results in “The wolf and the lamb had come to the same stream… the wolf stood higher, and the lamb was far lower… And so he tore the prey and killed it unjustly. This story was written because of those men who oppress the innocent with false causes.” The translation does not make a lot of sense to me, but it refers to this fable, found in Aesop and in both the Greek of Babrius and the Latin of Phaedrus, as “The Wolf and the Lamb”. The Wiki entry offers this phrasing:
“A wolf comes upon a lamb while both are drinking from a stream and, in order to justify taking its life, accuses it of various misdemeanors, all of which the lamb proves to be impossible. Losing patience, the wolf replies that the offenses must have been committed by some other member of the lamb’s family and that it does not propose to delay its meal by inquiring any further.”
And adds that “The morals drawn there are that the tyrant can always find an excuse for his tyranny and that the unjust will not listen to the reasoning of the innocent.”
A fable and moral thus proven once again by the ClimateGate Tyrants in the story of Alimonti et al. 2022.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
I had hoped that with climate science had gotten beyond this sort of tragic misbehavior. The silence of other scientists in the field has been even more appalling that the original offense. But the same bad actors just don’t seem to be able to restrain their lesser natures. Shall I name them? Michael Mann, Greg Holland, Lisa Alexander, Steve Sherwood, Friederike Otto, Stefan Rahmstorf. Others may have been involved in this incident, names unknown.
Nonetheless, Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani subsequently published another paper, “Is the number of global natural disasters increasing?”. They answer, as I and many others have concluded: “No, the number of natural disasters is not increasing!”
Thanks for reading.
You must log in to post a comment.