I think it's telling that none of the authors are geophysicists, and they definitely aren't statisticians either. The causality they're claiming just does not have any physical plausibility. > Dr. Homola states, “In the scientific world, it is accepted that a discovery can be said to have been made when the statistical confidence level of the corroborating data reaches five sigma, or standard deviations.” > Homola co…
Unless I'm missing something, that statement appears to be correct. They don't say their result isn't erroneous. They say there is statistically only a very tiny chance that the correlation is due to chance. If the correlation is caused by an error in their experiment, their statement is still correct, since the correlation was not due to chance.
Again, a p-value is not the chance that a result is erroneous - the statement you made is 100% mathematically incorrect. That was a major point of my previous post that you missed. It's a common misconception that the authors of this work are victims of. The linked PDF from the American Statistical Society explains things in more detail.