As someone schooled in quantum physics, I’d always looked down on climatologists such as Michael Mann. The sort of shenanigans that he and his ilk would engage in, I assumed, could not be found in the hallowed halls of a ‘hard science’ such as physics. But how wrong I was. Today, Microsoft scientists have had to retract a paper published in Nature back in 2018, in which they had announced a startling breakthrough in quantum computing:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56328980

Apparently, the authors have had to admit to ‘insufficient scientific rigour’. According to the above article:

“Their errors included:

• having ‘unnecessarily corrected’ some of the data and not having made this clear

• mislabelling a graph, making it misleading”

Mmm. This sounds familiar somehow. At least the physicists had the integrity to finally admit to their Nature trickery, unlike some I could mention.

The delicious irony here is that quantum computers are seen by the BBC as a vital weapon in the war against climate change:

“The prize for whoever builds a commercial quantum computer that can solve real-world problems such as tackling climate change will be huge.”

Alternatively, the problem might benefit from a few more Nature papers being retracted.

It’s just a thought.