Francesco Sylos Labini, Il Fatto Quotidiano

Climate deniers, those who argue that climate change is not occurring and/or not caused by humans, are often criticized for not engaging with the scientific literature in the field of climatology. There is nearly universal consensus within the scientific community that climate change is happening and is primarily due to human carbon dioxide emissions. However, there is an exception to this consensus in the form of an article published in The European Physical Journal Plus (EPJp), which is part of the Springer-Nature group, a major international publisher of scientific journals, including the renowned journal Nature.

EPJp is not one of the most prominent journals in the Springer-Nature group, and it publishes articles on various scientific topics but is not specialized in climatology. Typically, it has limited impact on the international scientific community. In September 2021, EPJp received an article on climatology, which, after a two-month peer-review process, was accepted. The article was authored by four Italian scientists who do not conduct research in the field of climate change: a nuclear physicist, a contract lecturer in agricultural sciences, a retired atmospheric physicist, Franco Prodi, known for his “climate denial” positions, and another nuclear physicist, Renato Angelo Ricci, a ninety-year-old former president of the Italian Physical Society.

This diverse group of authors drew rather revolutionary conclusions compared to the prevailing consensus in the field: “In conclusion, based on observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today is not yet evident.” What’s also surprising is that no reviewer raised substantial objections, which would have extended the acceptance timeline beyond the mere two months, an unusual occurrence for an article contradicting the views of over 95% of active climatologists worldwide.

The article remained in relative obscurity for the next nine months until it was featured on the front page of an Australian newspaper and subsequently covered by Sky News Australia in two videos that garnered over 500,000 views on YouTube. Given this unusual visibility, the article underwent scrutiny by various researchers specializing in climatology, who publicly stated that the article had misinterpreted some scientific studies, was “selective and biased,” and had cherry-picked information to support its claims.

Following these criticisms, Springer-Nature initiated an investigation into the article, requesting a post-publication review by subject matter experts. As a result of this investigation, the article was retracted. In academic publishing, retraction is a mechanism by which an article published in an academic journal is flagged as seriously inaccurate to the point that its results and conclusions are no longer considered valid. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but are marked as retracted. Often, it’s the authors themselves who realize they’ve made mistakes; other times, journal editors, who are responsible for the journal’s scientific content and the peer-review process, initiate further inquiry based on new information. In this case, it was the publisher of the journal who requested the investigation, embarrassing the editorial committee, which appears to have been entirely sidelined.

One might wonder: why hasn’t the editorial committee resigned? If the committee believes it did its job correctly, it should defend its actions to the end. If it feels overruled by the journal’s publisher, it should resign due to being sidelined. If it acknowledges suboptimal handling of the peer-review process, it should resign. There’s no third option. While this unfortunate incident is surprising in scientific publishing, it’s not surprising that the usual climate denier newspapers quickly intervened to denounce that a “methodologically correct” article was retracted because of its “dangerous” conclusions that would challenge the dogma of climate change, which the usual world leaders propagate to deceive the masses. If such nonsense gains traction, the ultimate responsibility lies with colleagues who create messes like this. However, if discussions on scientific articles were transparent and traceable, errors would be identified, and all “conspiracy theories” would be debunked.