Monday, December 22, 2014

Climate Alarmist Paper Retracted Due To Fake Peer Review

A favourite taunt of climate alarmists is that The Science has spoken and it's spoken in a decidedly alarmed and warmist fashion. But as we saw in the Climategate emails, subverting the process of peer review has been a key tactic of the warmists. Sometimes this subversion is through the process of pal review, sometimes it's through applying pressure to keep stray editors in line and sometimes, as in this case, it's outright dishonesty.

Pakistani economist Khalid Zaman has just has a tranche of publications retracted by Elsevier because of faked peer review. In all 16 papers have been withdrawn according to Retraction Watch, due to irregularities in the peer review process. In this case Zaman had set up fake email accounts which he then used to create fake peer reviewers. These fake peer reviewers, were surprisingly open to Zaman's work for some inexplicable reason.

Of the 16 papers retracted, one stands out in particular: Causal links between greenhouse gas emissions, economic growth and energy consumption in Pakistan: A fatal disorder of society. In this paper Zaman and co-authors set out to show that carbon emissions are destroying Pakistani society. The abstract concludes:

 ...emissions caused by consuming the energy [sic] is causing harm to the society by enlarge, and it reaches to the conclusion where we are heading toward a systematic fatal disorder of our society.
So, just to get the story right, according to the good Professor, it's not poverty, rampant corruption, military interference in politics, the Taliban, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism or proxy war with India that is destroying Pakistan, it's too much CO2. No wonder he had to make up his own peer reviewers. No sane person would have let that one go...

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