Two “depublications” will further erode public perception of the integrity of scientific research. The decline in trust is general, but more acute in areas of ideologically hypertrophied controversy, such as vaccines and the environment.
Nor is it appropriate to address the manufactured controversy over vaccination in the United States and outbreaks of preventable diseases, such as measles in Texas (803 cases, or nearly half of the 1,828 recorded in that country this year). Just look at the concrete examples of two environmental studies, on climate and pesticides.
The first retraction seems more scandalous, because it was published in a very prestigious journal, Nature (each article there is cited, on average, by 50 other works). And also because it considerably reduces, from 62% to 23%, the calculation of global GDP losses, until 2100, due to extreme weather events.
Donald Trump, determined to inject more fossil fuels into the global furnace, must have loved the mistake made by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK, in German). They used faulty data from Uzbekistan which, taken from the account, digs this 39 percentage point hole in the reputations of Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann and Leonie Wenz.
It is to their credit that they responded quickly and honestly to questions about the April 2024 article presented last August, 16 months later. They redid the calculations and requested the text’s cancellation, believing that the correction was insufficient, and it was published after three months – quite quickly, considering the typical slowness of self-correction processes in science, as we will see later.
PIK’s work has been reported around the world, including in Leaf. It has been viewed over 300,000 times and has received 168 citations in the literature. To what extent will this impact be offset by the economic slowdown? It is easier to predict that the merchants of doubts about global warming will accuse researchers of environmentalist bias, already with a hint of plausibility, thus complicating the lives of researchers and negotiators.
The phrase “merchants of doubts” appears in the title of a crucial book from 15 years ago, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, which has just been published in Brazil. In an interview with Leaf in September 2024, she warned that denial continues to wreak havoc, now like a digital zombie.
Oreskes is at the origin of a new feat: the “unpublication” of another research in the environmental field, this time on glyphosate, a pesticide most used in Brazil and considered “probably carcinogenic for humans” ten years ago. However, in this case, the retraction took 25 years to occur.
The unauthorized publication by Gary Williams, Robert Kroes and Ian Munro was published in 2000 in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. In September, Oreskes and Alexander Kaurov revealed that the article appears in the top 0.1% of the most cited works on this pesticide, even if since 2017 we have known that the reassuring text was written by ghostwriters from Monsanto.
The silence of the national agribusiness, no matter how loud it denies the climate crisis, will be deafening. In both cases, we will pay the price, and 23% of global GDP is no small feat.
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