Nature withdraws misleading article about climate change – 09/08/2023 – Environment

A study signed by Italian physicists that made baseless claims about the current climate emergency, saying that it is “not yet evident”, has just been retracted — in other words, “unpublished” — after months of investigation. The case was revealed by the British newspaper The Guardian.

The Springer Nature editorial group, responsible for publishing the European Physical Journal Plus, in which the research was published, states that the work “is not supported by the available evidence” on the topic.

This is a typical example of the mechanism that strengthens the circulation of false information about the climate crisis. Today, almost all climatologists on the planet agree on the existence of the climate emergency and the role of human beings as its main cause.

This means that works that would supposedly undermine this consensus, such as that coordinated by Gianluca Alimonti, from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Milan, are generally signed by researchers who do not work directly in the area. This is the case of Alimonti, whose specialty is particle physics — generally involving collisions between components of the atom in laboratory contexts.

In addition to not normally studying climate phenomena directly, authors of studies of this type generally publish them in so-called “low impact” scientific journals — that is, not very prestigious, in which there is little competition for space and, sometimes, a review system. less rigorous.

Once again, this is the case with the European Physical Journal Plus. In addition to the low impact factor, the journal also does not usually publish studies on climate.

Another component of the climate change disinformation ecosystem in the case of the Italian study is the fact that it was virtually ignored at the time of original publication (January 13, 2022).

Today, however, the article has around 107 thousand hits, thanks to the prominence it received in September 2022 in two Australian press vehicles, the newspaper The Australian and the Sky News Australia channel (the second, according to a British study, has become one of the main “distribution centers” for fake climate news in the English-speaking world in recent years).

This phenomenon is also very common in other cases of disinformation: apparently new and bombastic data is, in fact, “reheated” to give the impression that it is a recent and important discovery.

The research signed by Alimonti and colleagues does not include its own collection of climate data, but only analyzes some examples from the scientific literature on trends involving so-called extreme climate events — heat waves, excessive rains, cyclones, etc.

Based on this analysis, the Italian group states: “None of the indicators show a clear trend towards an increase in extreme events. In conclusion, based on observational data, the climate crisis that —according to many sources— we are experiencing today is not yet evident”.

However, after the article’s conclusions went viral thanks to the exposure of the topic in Australian media outlets, climatologists from the world’s main institutions dismantled the Italian team’s arguments. The root of the problem lies in what is commonly called “cherry-picking”.

In other words, the denialist research included in its database only studies that could be used to confirm its hypothesis, ignoring a batch of other studies that point to a considerable increase in different types of extreme events, as the current research consensus says.

In an official statement, the Springer Nature group said it had launched an in-depth investigation into the case. The study authors even suggested the inclusion of an addendum in their work, but the journal editor considered that this would not be enough.

“After careful consideration and consultations with all parties involved, the editors concluded that they no longer had confidence in the results and conclusions of the article,” said the journal’s management.

As a result, all pages of the text were marked with the expression “article retracted” from August 23rd. The research authors declined to comment on the case.