Debunking Junk Papers

Brandolini's Law states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." Obviously this "law" is informal and a bit tongue in cheek, but it rings true to my experience. There is so much junk published today in pay-to-play and predatory journals that there is simply too much written for scientists to take the time to evaluate, submit comments to the publishing journals, and see these papers retracted. So these papers are out and floating around for the denialsphere to use in service of their political agendas. I think its valuable for bloggers like me to wade through a subset of these papers and debunk them, doing our part to cut into the advantage that Brandolini's Law affords those producing junk science. Here's a running catalog of my attempts at debunking junk science "papers," books and manuscripts published by political think tanks disguised to look like papers (which I refer to as political "tracts"). I use the label "junk science" to identify these to make them easier to find in case I forget to update this page with new entries.

As I point out in my "disclaimer" on the front page of my blog, I am not an expert or a climate scientist. What I intend to show with these "debunking" posts is that any competent person with a blog and a spreadsheet can debunk the kinds of junk that contrarians are trying to pass off as science, provided they're willing to do some homework and employ some skepticism. Many (most?) of the authors of these papers are hoping that their readers won't do this.  The following lists these papers, tracts and books, and the links in the authors' names takes you to the debunking post. The posts contain links and/or citations to the writings so you can check up on what I say.

Junk Papers

Alimonti, G., Mariani, L., Prodi, F. et al. A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 137, 112 (2022). RETRACTED

Connolly, R., Soon, W., Connolly, M., Baliunas, S., Berglund, J., Butler, C. J., … Zhang, W. (2021). How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate. Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 21(6), 131.

Dengler, Joachim, and John Reid. 2023. "Emissions and CO2 Concentration—An Evidence Based Approach" Atmosphere 14, no. 3: 566.

Frank P. LiG Metrology, Correlated Error, and the Integrity of the Global Surface Air-Temperature Record. Sensors. 2023; 23(13):5976.

Robert Ian Holmes. Molar Mass Version of the Ideal Gas Law Points to a Very Low Climate Sensitivity, Earth Sciences. Volume 6, Issue 6, December 2017 , pp. 157-163.

Ole Humlum, Kjell Stordahl, Jan-Erik Solheim, The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature, Global and Planetary Change, Volume 100, 2013, Pages 51-69, ISSN 0921-8181.

Koutsoyiannis, D.; Onof, C.; Kundzewicz, Z.W.; Christofides, A. On Hens, Eggs, Temperatures and CO2: Causal Links in Earth’s Atmosphere. Sci 2023, 5, 35.

Jan Kubicki, Krzysztof Kopczyński, Jarosław Młyńczak, Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases, Applications in Engineering Science, Volume 17 (2024), 100170, ISSN 2666-4968. RETRACTED

McIntyre S., McKitrick R. (2003). “Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series” Energy and Environment Vol. 14, pp. 751–771.

McIntyre, S., and McKitrick, R. (2005), Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L03710, doi:10.1029/2004GL021750.

McKitrick, R. (2014) HAC-Robust Measurement of the Duration of a Trendless Subsample in a Global Climate Time Series. Open Journal of Statistics, 4, 527-535.

Nikolov N, Zeller K (2017) New Insights on the Physical Nature of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Deduced from an Empirical Planetary Temperature Model. Environ Pollut Climate Change 1:112.

Nikolov, Ned, and Karl F. Zeller. 2024. "Roles of Earth’s Albedo Variations and Top-of-the-Atmosphere Energy Imbalance in Recent Warming: New Insights from Satellite and Surface Observations" Geomatics 4, no. 3: 311-341.

Scafetta, N. (2022). Advanced testing of low, medium, and high ECS CMIP6 GCM simulations versus ERA5-T2m. Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2022GL097716.

Stefani F. Solar and Anthropogenic Influences on Climate: Regression Analysis and Tentative Predictions. Climate. 2021; 9(11):163.

Wegman, Edward J.; Said, Yasmin H.; Scott, David W. (2006), "Ad Hoc Committee Report On The 'Hockey Stick' Global Climate Reconstruction" (PDF), Congressional Report, United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce (published 14 July 2006).

W. A. van Wijngaarden and W Happer. Atmosphere and Greenhouse Gas Primer. Unpublished manuscript on arXiv. 2023.

Zharkova, V.V., Shepherd, S.J., Zharkov, S.I. et al. Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale. Sci Rep 10, 4336 (2019). RETRACTED

Political Tracts

William Happer and Richard Lindzen. Comment and Declaration on the SEC’s Proposed Rule “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors,” File No. S7-10-22, 87 Fed. Reg. 21334 (April 11,2022). CO2 Coalition.

Richard Lindzen, On Climate Sensitivity. CO2 Coalition.

Richard Lindzen and John Christy. The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record: How it works and why it is Misleading. CO2 Coalition. Dec 2020.

Roy Spencer (2024). "Global Warming: Observations vs. Climate Models" Heritage Foundation.

Andy May & Marcel Crok. The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: An Analysis of AR6. Clintel.

Books

Wrightstone, Gregory. INCONVENIENT FACTS: The science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know. Mill City Press. Kindle Edition. Part 2 of rebuttal here.

Steven Koonin. Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters