It was that rarest of things: a sliver of good news about climate change.
According to calculations published last year in Nature, our planet was keeping pace, and then some, with rising emissions from tropical forest clearance by gobbling up more and more atmospheric carbon.
“What we can mainly prove is that the worst nightmare scenarios of an impaired carbon sink have not yet materialised and that the news is not quite as bad,” Guido van der Werf, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a press release at the time.
His coauthor Dave van Wees added:
It may well be that some of the climate feedback loops that we are concerned about, such as the thawing of permafrost or more forest fires, are already making their mark but are being offset by other mechanisms.
But on Monday, Nature retracted the article, “New land-use-change emissions indicate a declining CO2 airborne fraction.” It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and was covered on at least one climate-skeptic blog.
Writing in the retraction notice, van der Werf and his colleagues acknowledged that their “statistical approach needs to be corrected and therefore accept a retraction as requested by the editor.”
We emailed van der Werf, van Wees and the paper’s first author, Margreet J. E. van Marle, for comments, but either did not hear back or received automatic replies stating they were unavailable.
The retraction follows an editor’s note from December stating the results were in question, and a short communication from April by researchers in Denmark and the Netherlands who took a fresh look at the data.
“A re-examination of the data using a variety of statistical tests finds no evidence of a trend on the whole sample and some evidence of a positive trend,” wrote Mikkel Bennedsen of Aarhus University, in Denmark, and his colleagues. In other words, a stable or growing fraction of anthropogenic emissions would remain in the atmosphere.
Bennedsen declined to comment for this article. According to the retraction notice, his team assisted van der Werf and his coauthors in revising their calculations, which will be re-submitted for publication.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Is Science, the magazine (not journal), still scientific or it is just part of the MSM now?
What about this 1971 Nature Opinion article, “The Great Greenhouse Scare”? Should this be retracted too?
The Great Greenhouse Scare. Nature 229, 514 (1971). https://doi.org/10.1038/229514a0
“Writing in the retraction notice, van der Werf and his colleagues acknowledged that their “statistical approach needs to be corrected and therefore accept a retraction as requested by the editor.””
In other words, their statistical approach gave the wrong answer and led to a conclusion that didn’t toe the political & ideological line concerning “climate change” so it must be “corrected” to give the politically correct and ideologically pure answer. that we are all doomed from “climate change” and drastic measures must be taken to save us all.
Science perverted to support a political agenda. How disgusting.
@William Kemmler:
“their statistical approach gave the wrong answer ”
“statistical approach needs to be corrected and therefore accept a retraction as requested”
“van der Werf and his coauthors (are)… revising their calculations, which will be re-submitted for publication”
You could have stopped with that, there are no politics.
@K
“their statistical approach gave the wrong answer ”
>> No, it gave a different answer. One that did not toe the political and ideological “climate change” line. So others claim they did their sums wrong and came to the “wrong answer”.
“statistical approach needs to be corrected and therefore accept a retraction as requested”
>> Sure does. How dare they claim that the so-called “climate change” scenario isn’t as bad as others have made it out to be. Retract! Retract! You must admit the errors of your ways and come to the proper political and ideological “climate change” conclusions!
You could have stopped with that, there are no politics.
>> Just where have you been living the last several decades, exactly? It’s ALL politics. And there’s just too much money at stake to have some rogue scientists claiming that “climate change” hasn’t reached the nightmare scenario of no return. Heretical thought in today’s politicized scientific establishment. It just isn’t done. The Consensus has spoken on climate change and there is no room for deviating from their conclusions.
Woe be unto the Scientist/Researcher that doesn’t toe the ideological and political line when it comes to “climate change”. Surprised they didn’t make the authors sit down and publicly admit to the errors of their ways and renounce their
You seem to have lots to say about the politics of this retraction suggesting it is unwarranted. This suggests you think that the critique by Bennedson et. al. linked above is unsound. Can you explain what is wrong with it?
Where did I say the “critique” was unsound. I didn’t. I’m more than sure they found some little nitpicky problem with the maths and used it as a reason to force a retraction of the paper and have it reissued with appropriate “corrections” that will coincidentally now support the current climate change hysteria.
Science perverted to support a political agenda. How disgusting.
William, beyond the explanation already asked by psyoskeptic, perhaps you can explain how this paper was published in Nature when it supposedly is all politics and they must “toe the ideological and political line when it comes to “climate change””? Clearly it was just fine it did not toe the line.
Perhaps a rethink is necessary for you, and in particular whether you are perhaps toeing the ideological and political line a wee bit too much when it comes to “climate change”.
Perhaps the problem is not only Politics with a capital “P”, but the politics of science itself, where results that support the consensus are, for obvious reasons, usually subject to less scrutiny than those that don’t. When you combine that natural tendency with strongly held non-scientific political beliefs that align with the current consensus view then you have a real risk of bias in the motivations for seeking retractions Nd the types of papers that tend to be retracted. Are all papers scrutinised and held to the same standards? That would be the ideal, but there’s no particular reason to believe that ideal is achieved. Certainly I have never spoken to a scientist who thinks so. Journals will naturally look to publish “interesting” ie. controversial results that do challenge the consensus. The fact that controversial results are some times published is no particular reason to think there is no bias amongst scientists, as opposed to publishers.
Results that go against the prevailing ideas are naturally more scrutinized, simply because they are more interesting to investigate further. Call it politics all you want, but if it were the type of politics William Kemmler claims, the paper would never have made it into Nature.
Peer review failed to weed this erroneous paper out? Peer review failed to catch the erroneous maths and let it be published? A secret cabal at Nature seeking to undermine climate change hysteria? Perhaps they thought it was a good paper and deserved to be published? Frankly, I have no idea why Nature allowed this paper to be published. Perhaps you could contact the relevant Editors at Nature and ask them why they allowed such a paper to be published — errors and all.