The Five Great Scandals in Climatology

Science is science because it is able to correct itself. This means that when researchers take a dead end, they turn around and look for another. However, science in highly politicized situations may face obstacles in correcting itself, meaning it can be difficult to change course when science deviates from its course. This is especially true when bad science becomes politically important. And here climatology finds itself in 2024.

The reader knows that climate change is real and poses risks. At the same time, the climate science community seems to have lost its collective ability to expose bad science and get things back on track. In this article we show the 5 biggest scandals in climate science that have occurred over the past few years. We must start with what is meant by scandal in this content. What is meant by scandal here is a case of objectively flawed science – in substance, in procedure or in both – that the scientific community has not been able to correct, but must do.

1- The trainees created a "dataset" and we used it in the research:

Who can forget the devastating 1974 hurricane? It was an example of an imaginary disaster in a fictional "dataset". The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – presumably one of the best scientific journals – published a research paper using a "dataset" compiled together by some interns to market for a now-defunct insurance company. In fact, no such set of data existed in the real world – it was fiction. The paper in question is the only study that claims to identify a reference to human-induced climate change in disaster losses and has therefore been highlighted by both the IPCC and the U.S. National Climate Assessment. This context makes correcting or withdrawing them a political problem. When the National Academy of Sciences Proceedings learned that the dataset was fake, they refused to look at it and stood behind the paper and blocked any reconsideration.

The International Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. National Weather Agency had more than 60 studies reviewed by other scientists, which could have been cited on detecting and attributing trends in extreme weather-related natural losses around the world. Guess which study they chose to promote? The study containing false data.

2- Pull out an article that shows an unpopular view:

The scientific community has shown its willingness to withdraw a scientific paper on climate – in this case not because it is wrong in any substantial way, but instead because it has expressed a politically unhelpful view. In 2022, a group of Italian scientists published a paper summarizing the IPCC's conclusions on extreme weather trends. This article was just a useful review of previous literature. However, many journalists and activist scientists demanded its withdrawal – surprisingly, the journal Springer Nature that published the paper responded to them and withdrew the article.

3- A big mistake in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

The International Panel on Climate Change is an excellent body, and if it did not exist, we would have to invent it. Not surprisingly, some bugs sneak in, but what matters is what happens when you discover errors. A major mistake crept into one of the IPCC reports, and it was about the intensity of hurricanes – in fact it was a minor mistake related to the technical terms that were misunderstood (hurricane measurements – reinterpreted as hurricanes). But this simple mistake was not acknowledged, nor corrected.

4- Disasters worth one billion dollars as the best indicator of climate change:

Much has been done for the so-called "billion-dollar disasters" table promoted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Indeed, a follower of this table can see its transformation from a clever marketing hoax into a leading scientific indicator of climate change. This Dataset uses unpublished methods, and different versions of the table include undocumented entries and changes. A peer-reviewed paper was recently published documenting problems with the dataset and its complete lack of transparency. Despite the obvious flaws in the table, it is a good example of a bad flag that has become too large to fail.

5- A love story with extreme emission scenarios:

Extreme emissions scenarios that paint an unreasonable, almost catastrophic, future are favorites in climate research and assessment. This area is still dominated by a scenario called RCP8.5 – which sees coal consumption increase more than 10-fold by 2100. However, with the scientific community accepting the absurdity of the RCP8.5 scenario, efforts are being made to replace it with a second extreme scenario, but it also predicts a massive increase in coal (about 6 times), and predicts a world of about 13 billion people in 2100, which is far more than the United Nations projections. In fact, there are many stories about how extreme scenarios have eaten away at climate science and the stubborn refusal of the scientific community to redirect. Climate and policy debates are often based on the unreality of unrealistic scenarios, and course correction has so far proved impossible.

The end:

In this article we have shown the 5 largest "scientific" scandals related to climate science. In fact, there are many others, and the reason is the intervention of science in climate policy, as well as the interference of politics in science. Care should be taken and people should be made aware of this topic.