Scientists’ petition on climate crisis blocked over fake signatories

Acclaimed scientists’ petition declaring climate crisis was signed by Albus Dumbledore and Mickey.

Mickey Mouse was a signatory on the climate crisis petition. Picture: AAP.

Dozens of signatories including Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore from Hogwarts have been ­removed from an Alliance of World Scientists declaration of a “climate emergency”.

Access to the 11,000 name-petition that accompanied a statement of concern published in BioScience on Tuesday was blocked on Thursday.

A statement issued by ­Oregon State University said “an administrative error unfortunately saw the inclusion of a small number of invalid names”.

The Alliance of World Scientists petition included Mickey Mouse from the Mickey Mouse School of the Blind, Namibia.

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“We have to date removed 34 names from the original list, most of which were duplicates.”

Concern about the petition, which was heavily promoted internationally as a call for action on climate change, was sparked by questions about some of its celebrity signatories.

Mickey Mouse from the Mickey Mouse School of the Blind, Namibia made it through onto an official list published along with the BioScience article.

After the statement had been submitted to the journal, claiming the support of 11,000 world scientists, Mickey was joined on the list by Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts.

The first signature on the online list was Araminta Aadvark, professor of Zoology at Univer­sity of Neasden, UK.

Albus Dumbledore also made it onto the official list published with a major article in BioScience.

Neasden University is believed to be a fictitious university promoted by the British satirical magazine Private Eye that was printed in Neasden.

The climate emergency statement included authors from University of Sydney and ­Oregon State University.

Sydney University said on Thursday the petition was being managed by Oregon State.

An online link to the petition on Thursday said “access ­denied” and “you are not allowed access to this page”.

The page was later changed to “Viewing signatures is currently unavailable. We are working on the issue.”

The Alliance of World Scientists claims to have 23,000 members from 180 countries.

The paper published in BioScience warned that “untold human suffering” is unavoidable without deep and lasting shifts in human activities that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and other factors related to climate change.

It said mitigating and adapting to climate change meant “transforming the ways we govern, manage, eat, and fulfil material and energy requirements”.

The scientists said global surface temperatures were not sufficient to measure climate change that should be tracked by a scorecard of population, meat consumption, forest loss and the use of air transport.

The statement has been lauded by science groups as significant.

Despite the suspension of the petition and removal of names, Oregon State said the “weight of support” from the world’s scientific community for the declaration remained undiminished.

But consulting geologist Marc Hendrickx, who highlighted the errant signatures, said “legitimate researchers passionate about the scientific method do not do ­science by social media”.