For those readers who had their hopes pinned on how the Earth circles the sun as explaining the warm up in temperatures, in particular based on this study in Scientific Reports, I have some bad news:
A prominent scientific journal has retracted a study claiming that climate change was due to solar cycles rather than human activity.
Last year, Scientific Reports came under fire for publishing a paper that researchers said made elementary mistakes about how Earth moves around the sun.
Today the journal, published by Nature Research, which also has Nature in its stable of titles, formally retracted the paper by a team at UK universities and an institution in Azerbaijan.
The withdrawn study had argued that the average global 1°C temperature rise since the pre-industrial period was due not to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions but to the distance between Earth and the sun changing over time as the sun orbits the barycentre, the solar system’s centre of mass. In a statement today, Scientific Reports said that was inaccurate. …
“Solar system orbital dynamics is extremely well understood, and it wouldn’t have taken much for the authors to have checked if their claims about the significance of the motion of the sun around the solar system barycentre were indeed correct,” [Astronomy Professor Ken Rice at the University of Edinburgh, UK] says. [NewScientist, 14 March 2020]
Which casts shade on the rest of the paper. If you click on the link to the study, it’s prominently marked as RETRACTED.
And, yes, at least one of the authors is upset:
Valentina Zharkova at the University of Northumbria, one of the paper’s authors, says the retraction was unfair and the corrections made to the paper were minor.
Apparently, the experts disagreed and made a convincing case to the editors of Scientific Reports.
