Comments on “Little ado about everything” by A. Lapi et al. and on cosmological back-reaction

In two papers, A. Lapi et al. introduce and discuss what they call the ηCDM model, a stochastic framework in which they claim that fluctuations in the density field at the scale of tens of Mpc due to structure formation would effectively drive the accelerated expansion of the Universe. They claim that this qualitative behaviour would emerge from the dynamics of standard cold dark matter alone, without introducing any new physics. In this short comment, I argue that such a proposition is implausible. Some of my remarks are relevant more generally to frameworks that try to describe cosmological back-reaction.