The above-mentioned article was retracted in 2018 after many attempts by organized Teams. Any serious reader will immediately understand why the article should have been retracted: it challenges the norm that human beings and anthropogenic CO2 are responsible for global warming. The article shows that experimental verifications are absent, software predictions were wrong, studies for the sun are missing and so forth.
The accusers on their website mention that their organization, Skeptical Science, has as mission to “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.” In a most prominent place in their home page, they list a number of what they call “MYTHS” on climate. It just occurs that the whole list is in full accordance with the “norm” and against whoever may be uncertain about the real reasons behind global warming. Amazingly, “Skeptical Science,” mostly consisting of “part-time” or amateur climate‐related scientists and non‐academics (no disrespect, of course), even list a number of people (many of whom respected scientists and academics) that they call “mis-informers” (see: http://www.skepticalscience.com/misinformers.php). It is obvious to us that this organization has political or “political” agendas aiming at fighting (almost scientifically terrorizing) anyone not in line with their “norm” (this is a political position, and raises questions about their funding). Their argumentation seems to be based on sheer poll‐type statistics and sentiment, and is quite distant from hard‐core academic science.
For four years repeatedly, they tried to achieve the retracting of the article, which is a piece of work that, of course, had undergone the proper reviewing process according to the rules of the journal. They claimed that (i) “the paper misrepresents the current state of knowledge in the field”, and (ii) that the article should be investigated for plagiarism as it bears substantial similarity to “Chapter 3: Global Warming: CO2 vs Sun”; Georgios A. Florides, Paul Christodoulides and Vassilios Messaritis; Global Warming, Edited by Stuart Arthur Harris, 2010. The then editor, responsible for the article’s publication, did not even mention the word retraction and simply asked for our reply to the accusations. We addressed in a comprehensive manner the “plagiarism” issue and we challenged the accusers to prepare an article opposing the scientific matter of our article, an article that was going through the standard reviewing process. Besides, this is the true scientific meaning by which science progresses. The editor came back with the following suggestion: The accuser should write a response to our paper and then we could write a response to that. Both notes would then appear in a future issue of the Journal. Useful note: The plagiarism issue was not mentioned any more (July 2015). The accusers wrote an insulting (to us and science) note that we refused to answer, suggested other solutions to the editor and expected his “verdict” (May 2016). Any case the insulting note never appeared in the Journal.
More than one year after (July 2017) the editor comes with “new” accusations (by the same people) concentrating only on the plagiarism issue (that had been forgotten for 2 years! Useful note: The scientific content of the paper was not an issue now. We replied to the editor and expected his response. Then (December 2017), when a new and to our eyes inexperienced editor undertook the responsibility to deal with this case, the accusers finally succeeded their goal and the paper has been retracted for the trivial excuse that the authors repeated some of their ideas, which were presented in a book chapter; i.e. the authors stole their own thoughts. According to an old Greek saying “One who cannot beat the donkey, beats the saddle.” It is well known that politics can destroy science. We are still expecting to see a scientific article by the accusers that will allow us to open a healthy conversation for the sake of knowledge and science.
On the other hand, we the authors “thank” the new editor for “advertising” our book chapter, which the interested reader can find on line at: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=taQfkX0AAAAJ&hl=en#d=gs_md_cita-d&p=&u=%2Fcitations%3Fview_op%3Dview_citation%26hl%3Den%26user%3DtaQfkX0AAAAJ%26cstart%3D20%26pagesize%3D80%The interested reader can find another of our articles on the same subject: Florides, G.A. and Christodoulides, P., 2009. Global warming and carbon dioxide through sciences. Environment international, 35(2), pp.390-401 and can be found at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412008001232
We close this note with what our experience has taught us: Do not take for granted what you hear or read. Seek the truth by doing your own search.
The Authors