We must fearlessly pursue truth, and truth alone

Climate change is a real and relevant phenomenon. For this reason, it seems clear that scientists must strive to tell the truth about the nature of the challenge. However, it has become trendy to knowingly exaggerate the risk for the ‘greater good’. In reality, all this does is undermine confidence in not just climate science, but all science.

Take, for example, the highly impactful – and highly misleding – Bioscience review paper titled “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth”. This viral article (66 citations since publication already!) provides a wholly negative view of the state of the climate and Earth’s surface environments in general, with no attempt at balance, and one egregious example of outright misleading content.

The biggest claim in the article is a fabrication intended to shock: figure 5f. This figure is titled ‘Risk of societal collapse’ and contains a histogram of papers that increase in number towards present. This is then discussed in the text as reason to be concerned about the end of the world. Reading this, I was immediately suspicious. For one thing, the authors do not provide anywhere a reference list of the papers tabulated. When I contacted them to ask for their source data, they told me to reproduce it myself. So, I did just that.

The results of my investigation were published in a commentary after much back and forth with the journal, which seemed more interested in saving face than in ensuring rigorous science. While the editors refused to let me publish the following figure, you can see the problem in it very easily: when filtered for relevance, there are no articles in existence that are supportive of societal collapse from climate change, refer to modern society, and use some kind of quantitative method.

By rights, Figure 5f in Ripple et al should be a blank histogram, not an ominiously increasing one with no sources listed! Absurdly, one of the citations returned when using the methodology of Ripple et al (which is: search for any and all papers containing the word ‘climate’ and ‘collapse’) is ‘A sex toy for the climate apocalypse’…

You can read the rest of my breakdown here. It did not go quite as viral as the original misleading article. Perhaps you, dear reader, can help by sharing it and this article?

It is important, because bad science communication such as that exemplified by Ripple et al (2024) is undermining faith in science in general. We need to ensure that science is being rigorously done, and disincentivise journals from publishing glorified ‘ends justify means’ activism (see their Fig. 4, which is inappropriately emotive for a scientific article, and indeed the apocalypse-adjacent title of the article itself). Truth matters, and the truth is that the future is not all doom and gloom.

Fig. 4 in Ripple et al (2024).

The Earth is greening, deaths from extreme weather are trending down, human poverty and malnourishment are both projected to continue to improve despite climate change, fire risk is headed downwards, hurricane frequency shows no long term trend, and coral growth is currently at all time highs on the Great Barrier Reef. These are just some of the lines of evidence that Ripple et al (2024) did not include in their assessment. Honest assessments must report the good with the bad, rather than cherry pick to form a particular narrative.

Ripple did reply to my comment. The reply freely admits that many of their sources for Fig. 5f have nothing to do with quantitative evaluations of risk, but claims that the sex toy article was in fact not cited. Yet, despite the embarrassment of this implication, the authors still did not do the obvious thing of just sharing the original reference list used to make Fig 5f! I wonder why…

We must do better. We must fearlessly pursue truth, and truth alone.