Climate crazy
Retraction, the new weapon of activist scientists
Unfortunately, it is more common nowadays: scientists who disagree with a peer-reviewed publication and then do not enter into a scientific debate about the content, but ask the journal to retraction the article.
This attitude of boycotting and framing is in line with the 'woke' attitude that is common in some Western universities these days. Lectures are banned or disrupted, the curriculum is adjusted, et cetera. At least as dangerous is that some climate scientists see boycotting a publication they do not like as a moral duty to 'protect' the social debate on climate. That's what you get when a science is as highly politicized as climate science. Boycotting a peer-reviewed paper is of course completely reprehensible from the scientific point of view.
Two years ago, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. described a well-known case of 'retraction', in which it became clear how the lines in the power game run. A peer-reviewed publication, in which there was no fraud or anything like that, was destroyed in a 'professional' manner. That story appeared on Pielke's substack 'The Honest Broker'.
Pielke studied mathematics and political science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research from 1993 to 2001 and received the Eduard Brückner Prize for interdisciplinary climate research and an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden. I asked permission to translate the article and publish it on Klimaatgek.
https://klimaatgek.nl/wordpress/2025/10/02/retraction-het-nieuwe-wapen-van-activistische-wetenschappers/