I have been contacted by a whistleblower with a remarkable story of corruption of the academic peer-review process involving a paper published in 2022. The whistleblower has provided me with relevant emails, reviews and internal deliberations from which I recount this disturbing episode — which ends with an unwarranted and politically-motivated retraction of a paper that some climate scientists happened to disagree with.

The paper at the center of this story is not particularly significant, as it mainly reviews the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on trends in weather extremes. The paper does venture a bit too far (in my view) into commentary, but that is neither unique nor a basis for retracting a paper – if it were we’d have a lot of retractions!

To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement. Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.