Facts about climate change that should not be so

The original article can be read as “Schlumpfs graphic 115” in the online Nebelspalter of 10 June 2024.

It is a widespread opinion that the number of extreme weather events such as storms or floods has already increased due to climate change and that this trend will intensify. It is hardly recognised that this claim has even been largely refuted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report (see here). And anyone who points out, in agreement with the IPCC, that there is no observable trend in natural disasters runs the risk of being accused of untruth by alarmist journalists and climate scientists: here are two examples of this.

What is important:

• A peer-reviewed scientific study by Italian researcher Gianluca Alimonti was retracted by the journal in which it had appeared.
• The study had come to the conclusion that no climate crisis had yet materialised.
• The retraction followed a one-sided and arbitrary procedure.
• Another example from Switzerland shows how climate activists ensure that facts they don’t like are removed from the world.

My first story is based on a blog post by the American environmental scientist Roger Pielke Jr (see here). Pielke was only able to write this article because a whistleblower from the Springer Nature publishing house provided him with important documents on the case. All of these documents are now publicly available (see here).

“The Guardian” opened the criticism

At the centre of this story is the study published in January 2022 in “The European Physical Journal Plus” (EPJP) by a team led by Italian physicist Gianluca Alimonti, in which a large number of current studies on trends in extreme events were evaluated (see here). They found no clear trend in the frequency of extreme weather events. The authors therefore summarised their research on storms, floods and droughts in one sentence: “Based on observational data, it can be concluded that the climate crisis that many sources believe we are experiencing today is not yet evident.”

After the study was discussed in the Australian media, the British magazine “The Guardian” was the first to react with fierce criticism in September 2022 (see here). In the article, four scientists called for the study to be withdrawn because it violated the consensus of climate experts. Shortly afterwards, a report by AFP, Europe’s largest media agency, echoed the same sentiments. This strong public criticism forced the editors of the EPJP journal to react.

No critic made a written submission

After internal discussions and also on the recommendation of the study’s lead author Gianluca Alimonti, EPJP seemed to agree to request a written statement from the scientists who had criticised in the Guardian and in the AFP – as is customary in a scientific discussion. To all appearances, however, none of those asked responded and nothing happened for the time being.

Questionable objection to the study

In the meantime, however, the main publisher Springer Nature (see here), which publishes EPJP, had also become involved in the clarifications. On 17 November 2022, EPJP and Springer Nature asked Alimonti’s team to write an “erratum” in which the “clear weakness of their work” was to be corrected. By this weakness, the publisher meant that the authors had only compared the results of their study with the findings of the IPCC report AR5 from 2013, but not with the findings of the latest IPCC report AR6. However, this latest report had not even been published at the time the study was written!

Despite this unjustified criticism, Alimonti and his colleagues wrote a detailed “addendum” in which – as requested by the publisher – they compared the results of their study at the time with those of the new IPCC report, which had been published in the meantime, on the topics of floods, heavy precipitation and droughts. They came to the conclusion that, apart from minor details, there are no differences between the results of these two documents.

IPCC: No trends in floods, heavy rainfall and droughts

I can verify this finding with the next graphic from the current Assessment Report AR6 (see here). The graph shows an excerpt from the table summarising the results on trends in climatic impact drivers:

The drivers (i.e. extreme weather events) are listed in the second column from the left. I have marked all the variables that are decisive for the assessment of the Alimonti addendum, namely floods, heavy rainfall and two types of drought, with red dots. The third column shows the trends observed to date for the corresponding drivers: Coloured cells are used to express what trends there are with at least medium confidence, white cells indicate that no trends can be discerned.

The graph therefore shows that the data available to date does not indicate an increase in these events on a global scale for either floods, heavy rainfall or droughts (white cells everywhere). It also shows that no trends are to be expected even for the future until the end of this century (columns 4 and 5).

Majority of experts recommended publication of the “addendum”

As agreed, the Alimonti “Addendum” was then scrutinised by four experts. Three of them were in favour of publication, one was against. Given this obvious agreement between Alimonti and the IPCC, were the external criticisms of the study rejected by the publisher? Not at all. A fifth expert opinion was obtained from a so-called “adjucator”. This expert recommended that the “addendum” should not be published and that the original work should be rejected (although he was not consulted about this).

Eight months after the proceedings were opened, they were concluded on 13 July 2023 with an internal email stating that all of the adjucator’s recommendations had been accepted on the grounds that he was a “leading expert in this field”. The journal EPJP together with Springer Nature thus decreed that the “addendum” was not published and that the original article also had to be withdrawn.

Comment in the NZZ: No trends in extreme events

On 23 August 2023, a note on the retraction (Retraction Note, see here) appeared in the EPJP, stating that concerns were raised about the study, which led to this retraction. However, it is probably unique that a peer-reviewed study has ever been subject to such a process – quite apart from the fact that the process was one-sided and arbitrary.

However, as my second story shows, there are also such “truth watchdogs” for the climate crisis in Switzerland. A colleague of mine, journalist Markus Schär, published an article in the NZZ on 9 October 2023 entitled “Swiss television has been fuelling climate panic for 35 years” (see here). In this article, Schär explains his research into the history of Swiss climate policy, which he summarised in a master’s thesis at the University of Zurich.

Hauled before the Press Council

In the middle of the article is the sentence “Science still sees no trend towards more extreme events.” – a statement completely in line with the graph shown above. Because of this sentence, Damian Birchler filed a complaint against the NZZ with the Swiss Press Council, claiming that paragraph 3 of the “Declaration” had been violated. This would mean that Schär had “suppressed important elements of information or distorted facts” in his article.

In support of this, Birchler quoted highly selectively from the IPCC’s “Summary for Policymakers” (see here). However, this summary, which politicians have a say in writing, does not carry the same scientific weight as the baseline report from which the table shown originates. And it is difficult for Markus Schär, who has been criticised: to date (eight months later), the Press Council has still not made a decision.

The two stories show that climate activists are obviously very vigilant about whether their alarmist stance could be disturbed by scientific facts. If this is the case, they protest loudly and try by all means to get rid of these facts.