Top Five Climate Science Scandals 2025

Two things are true at once — First, humans influence the climate system, presenting risks that merit policy attention. Second, climate research, broadly construed, is a deeply politicized endeavor, leaving much room for improvement.

One feature of the deep politicization of climate is that some people wish to only believe one of these two truths. Developing effective policies related to energy, development, extreme events and disasters depends upon grappling effectively with these two truths.

In 2024, I created a table of the top five climate science scandals in an effort to shine a bright light on areas where the climate community could readily address some of the most egregious failures within the field.

The scientific community can only control what it can control — Big P politics is not among those things, and there is no guarantee that efforts to uphold scientific integrity will make much difference in the political world. But it does seem clear that securing the confidence and trust of our fellow citizens and those empowered to lead will be much more likely if we act to uphold scientific integrity, rather than letting bad science stand.

In today’s post, I both identify fives scandal that I judge to be the most significant as 2025 comes to a close and recommend positive steps that the community might take to correct course.

With the throat clearing out of the way, let’s get to it . . .

5️⃣ An Undeniably Fake Dataset Used in Research and Promoted in Assessments

In any area of scientific publishing, you will not find a more open and shut case for the retraction of published studies than with those peer-reviewed papers that have used the so-called “ICAT dataset” of economic losses from hurricanes.

As I have documented in detail at THB (here, here, and here) and also in the peer-reviewed literature, the dataset is fake and should have no role in research.

Pielke Jr, R. (2025). Do not use the ICAT hurricane loss “dataset”: An opportunity for course correction in climate science. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 64(4), 401-407.

There are perhaps a dozen or more peer-reviewed papers that employ the fake dataset. One of these papers in particular has been promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Climate