Climate-change denialists got all excited
last week by an alleged revelation that the top science journals are bullying
climate scientists into presenting the most alarmist versions of their
research, and suppressing anything that doesn’t fit with a “climate catastrophe”
narrative. The problem (this story went) has been exposed by a whistleblower
named Patrick Brown, formerly an academic scientist who now works for a
privately funded environmental research centre.
Sounds bad? Is this another Climategate?
But it takes very little digging at all before a very different, and extremely
strange, story emerges.
Let’s start this tale with Matt Ridley. In
his column
in The Telegraph, he tells us this:
Patrick Brown, the
co-director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California,
has blown the whistle on an open secret about climate science: it’s biased in
favour of alarmism. He published a paper
in Nature magazine on the effect of climate change on wildfires. In it
he told the truth: there was an effect. But not the whole truth: other factors
play a big role in fires too. On Maui, the failure of the electric utility to
manage vegetation along power lines was a probable cause of the devastating
recent fires, but climate change proved a convenient excuse.
OK, wait – what? So Brown knowingly
suppressed facts relevant to the conclusion his paper reported? Was this some
kind of “gotcha” stunt to show that you can get any old nonsense through peer
review, even at a major journal? Oh no, not at all. In his blog
about the issue, Brown tells us this:
I knew not to try to quantify key
aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the
story that prestigious journals like Nature
and its rival,
Science, want to tell.
This
matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in
high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career
success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly
clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate
papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives
come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.
To put
it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the
complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra,
urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However
understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate
science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical
solutions more difficult to achieve.
Oh, people really
don’t know any longer about the myth of Cassandra, do they? Cassandra’s prophecies
were true, but she was fated not to be believed. Anyway, Brown goes on to say:
I
wanted the research to be published in the highest profile venue possible. When
I began the research for this paper in 2020, I was a new assistant professor
needing to maximize my prospects for a successful career.
So he is telling us that he wanted to get a
paper in Nature to advance his career and he figured that telling this
partial, distorted story was the best way to achieve this aim.
Kinda weird, right? And not exactly the
exposé story Matt Ridley implied. Rather, Brown seems to be admitting to having
committed the unethical practice of keeping certain facts hidden, or simply
unexamined, in order to get on in the academic world.
Well OK – but can you blame him if that’s
the only way to succeed? I mean, it is still weird for him to come out and
admit it, but you can understand the motive, at least – right?
Except… is he correct about this? His
charge – “the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by
what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that
support certain preapproved narratives” – is pretty damned serious: the editors
of Nature and other top journals are curating the scientific message they
put out. You’d imagine Brown would back up that accusation with some solid
evidence. But no, it is all assertion. It seems it’s “obvious” that Nature
editors and those of other distinguished journals are biased because Brown’s
own papers have been previously rejected by said journals. What other reason
could there have been for that, people, than editorial bias?
Still, Brown does cite one bit of evidence
in his favour: he says that some scientists err on the side of using worst-case
climate scenarios. “It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary
hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility,” he says. And here
he points to an article that (rightly) decries this tendency and calls for more
realistic baselines. Yet that
article was published in – good lord, who’d have thought it? – Nature,
the journal that allegedly always wants you to believe the worst. I’m not sure
this is really helping his case.
Brown apparently knows for sure that his
paper would have been rejected by Nature if he’d included all the
complexities, such as considering the other, non-climate-related factors that
could have influenced changes in the frequency of forest fires. For example, if
the number of fires has increased, perhaps that might be partly due to changes
in patterns of vegetation, or of human activities (like more fires getting
ignited by humans either deliberately or by accident)?
How does he know that the Nature
editors would have responded negatively to the inclusion of these caveats,
though? The scientific way would, of course, have been to conduct the
experiment: to send the fuller paper, including all those nuances, and see what
happened. But Brown did not need to do that, it seems; he just knew. We
should trust him.
Even Ted Nordhaus, director of the Breakthrough
Institute in California where Brown now works, has admitted that this
counterfactual does not exist. So Brown’s claims are mere hearsay. (Why has
Nordhaus weighed in at all, given that he was not involved in the research?
I’ll come back to that.)
On his blog Brown says that he omitted
those caveats from the study because they would just get in the way of a punchy
conclusion that, in his view, would maximize the chances of getting
published in Nature:
In my
paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously
relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more
realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract
from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and
thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.
The trouble is, these days Nature provides
the referees’ reports and authors’ responses to published papers online. And
these contradict this narrative. It turns out the one referee highlighted
precisely some of the issues that Brown and colleagues omitted. He said:
The second aspect
that is a concern is the use of wildfire growth as the key variable. As the authors
acknowledge there are numerous factors that play a confounding role in wildfire
growth that are not directly accounted for in this study (L37-51). Vegetation
type (fuel), ignitions (lightning and people), fire management activities (
direct and indirect suppression, prescribed fire, policies such as fire bans
and forest closures) and fire load.
And Brown responded that his methods of
analysis couldn’t handle these other factors:
Accounting for changes in all of these variables and their potential
interactions simultaneously is very difficult. This is precisely why we chose to use a methodology
that addresses the much cleaner but more narrow question of what the influence
of warming alone is on the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth.
In a very revealing interview with Brown for the website
HeatMap, Robinson Meyer
pushed further on this issue. If Brown agreed that these were important
considerations, and the referees asked about them, said Meyer, why didn’t he look
into them further? Brown says:
I think
that, that’s very good that the reviewers brought that up. But like I said
before, doing that is, then, it’s not a Nature
paper. It’s too diluted in my opinion to be a Nature paper.
This is
what I’m trying to highlight, I guess, from the inside as a researcher doing
this type of research. Reviewers absolutely will ask for good sensitivity
tests, and bringing in caveats, and all that stuff, but it is absolutely your
goal as the researcher to navigate the reviews as best you can. The file even
gets automatically labeled Rebuttal
when you respond to the reviewers. It’s your goal to essentially get the paper
over the finish line.
And you
don’t just acquiesce to reviewers, because you’d never get anything published.
You don’t just say, Oh you’re right, okay, we will go back and do that work for
five years and submit elsewhere. The reality of the situation is you have to go
forward with your publication and get it published.
On the one hand, this is all honest enough:
peer review is something of a game, where referees tend to want to see
everything addressed and authors take the view that they’d never be
ready to publish if they had to do that, so they generally aim to get away with
doing the minimum needed to push things past the reviewers. That’s fair enough.
But it is totally at odds with the story
Brown is now trying to tell. On these accounts, Brown did not in fact omit the
confounding factors because he thought they would complicate the kind of
message Nature and its referees would demand. He omitted them because
they were too difficult to include in the study. And far from being pleased by
an incomplete study that supported the narrative Brown had decided the editors
and reviewers would look for, the reviewers – one of them, at least – called for
a more complete analysis. It seems then that the reviewer would have been more
pleased with the more complete study. Brown is admitting that it was he
who tried to push the paper past the finish line in the face of these concerns.
Some climate sceptics have still tried to
make this sound like a shortcoming of the journal and the reviewers: ah look,
they didn’t push very hard for that extra stuff, did they? But this won’t wash
at all. First, the authors were commendably upfront about the limitations of
the study – the paper itself says
Our
findings, however, must be interpreted narrowly as idealized calculations
because temperature is only one of the dozens of important variables that
influences wildfire behaviour.
For the referees to pass the paper once it
included this word of caution is entirely reasonable. After all, Brown stands
by it even now:
You
might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not. On the
contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in
day-to-day wildfire behavior.
In short, there is not a problem here,
beyond what Brown seems now keen to manufacture. If, as he says, the paper is “less
useful than it could have been”, it is clear who is responsible for that.
Note by the way that, in response to a
Nature news editor (independent from the manuscript handling team) who raised
this issue, Nordhaus (again) said “The reviewer did not
raise an issue about "vegetation and human ignition pattern changes".
The reviewer raised an issue about holding absolute humidity constant.” As you
can see above, this is clearly untrue. Nordhaus is simply referring to a
different reviewer – despite surely having all of the reviewers’ reports
available to him. I’m going to be charitable and assume he didn’t read them
properly. But you will have to forgive me if I suspect an agenda behind
Nordhaus’s involvement in the whole affair.
Talking of agendas: back to Matt Ridley,
who has mentioned none of this in his column. He claims that the episode proves
that “Editors at journals such as Nature seem to prefer publishing
simplistic, negative news and speculation about climate change.”
Matt’s
story suggests that the publication of Brown’s paper has exposed the fact that
climate scientists are hiding facts from us that are inconvenient to their
narrative about catastrophic climate change.
Well, Brown’s
paper is hiding from
us facts that suggests the problem he looked at might not be as bad as it
looks. But is this because he is a climate scientist with the agenda of doing
so? No, it is because he knowingly withheld those facts - seemingly, did
not even bother to investigate them, although to be fair that might be because
he was unable to. But does the publication of his paper suggest that other
scientists were prepared to turn a blind eye to that? No, because one of the
reviewers raised the omission as a problem. Does the publication of the paper
show that indeed there is a bias in the literature whereby papers that present
an unmitigatedly bleak picture of extreme climate change get accepted but those
that are more nuanced get rejected? Evidently it shows nothing of the sort. The
only “evidence” for that is that Brown says so. Matt has not challenged that
assertion, or asked for evidence, but recycles it as fact.
Matt then echoes Brown’s line that
“the problem is all solutions [to climate change] are taboo [in the scientific literature].”
He says:
If I
waved a magic wand and gave the world unlimited clean and cheap energy
tomorrow, I expect many climate scientists would be horrified: they would be
out of a job.
It is hard to know what to say
about this, other than that it is one of the most absurd things Matt has ever
written (yes!). Climate scientists are in fact horrified by what is happening
to the climate. So am I. Like them, I would be beside myself with joy if Matt
were able to do this. (This is one of the reasons why I value work being done
on nuclear fusion, which could ultimately provide a significant, clean source
of power, albeit not soon enough to rescue us from the current climate crisis.)
Frankly, for Matt to say this of
climate scientists is not just absurd but deeply offensive.
This idea that climate scientists
have to play up global warming to protect their jobs is on the one hand risible
and on the other hand a standard trope of conspiracy theorists: climate
scientists have their self-interest at heart. It is really very peculiar that
Matt and others seem to believe that if climate change ended, there would be no
more climate. For that, folks, is in fact what climate scientists study. There
are so many things left for them to study, so much we don’t know about climate.
I imagine some climate scientists dearly wish they could study things other
than global warming (and of course lots of them do).
What is ironic to the point of
hilarity about the episode is this: Ridley and others are claiming that this is
a story about how climate science insists of a simplistic narrative that
ignores all nuance, but in order to do that they must create a simplistic story
devoid of all nuance. The fact is that the story is deeply, deeply odd. For Brown’s
version amounts to something like this:
Climate
science is biased and broken and ignores complexities that don’t fit its
narrative, creating a misleading picture. Meanwhile, I have published a paper
that ignores complexities that don’t fit that conventional narrative and is
therefore misleading. But the paper is in fact good and I’m not at all ashamed
of it, and its conclusions still apply. But also it is also a deliberate
partial falsification. I was forced to do this for career advancement, but only
because I’d decided that was the case – I didn’t bother to submit the paper I
should have written to see if my preconceptions were correct, and in fact I
didn’t even try to do the work that would have required. The fact that Nature
published the paper just shows that they only look for the simplistic
narrative, even though their peer review process asked me to go into the
complexities but I told them that was not possible and they and the referees
accepted my explanation on good faith. So shame on Nature for publishing
this poor work which is in fact also perfectly respectable and useful work,
because I did it, but not as useful as it could have been if I’d done the other
things that needed doing but which I didn’t do because I chose not to or
couldn’t. And it’s all a scandal!
Sorry, it really
doesn’t make any sense, does it? But there you have it.