Patrick T. Brown is a PhD in Climatology, Co-Director of the Climate and Energy Collective at the Breakthrough Institute, and Lecturer in the Energy and Climate Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University.

Patrick T. Brown, a PhD in Earth and Climate Sciences from Duke University, also holds an MS in Meteorology and Climatology from San Jose State University and a BS in Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He has conducted research at the Carnegie Institution of Stanford University, NASA JPL at the California Institute of Technology, NASA Langley in Virginia, NASA Goddard in Washington, and NOAA GFDL at Princeton University.

Published articles in Nature, PNAS and Nature Climate changeas well as in many other journals and provided commentary for The New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Guardian, ABC News San Francisco and CBS News San Franciscoamong others.

On August 30, 2023, Brown and a group of his collaborators published in the journal naturally study Climate warming increases the daily risk of wildfire growth in California. The conclusion of the study, which is easy to predict in the current climate-policy context, is that the daily risk of extreme fires in California is increasing due to anthropogenic warming.

On September 5, 2023, Patrick T. Brown dropped a colossal bombshell.

I wrote earlier about the essential importance of an honest and complete presentation of the whole truth in scientific works:

Scientific integrity means that the author did not deceive, did not deceive, on purpose.

Scientific integrity is not only a question of honesty or dishonesty, it is placed on another, higher level. This means that all information is available for readers to review and evaluate. [1]

But let’s give the floor to Dr. Patrick T. Brown to learn more about the ins and outs of getting climate articles published in prominent journals like naturally:

The document I just published, A warming climate increases the daily risk of wildfires in California, focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected the behavior of extreme wildfires. I knew I didn’t need to quantify key issues other than climate change in my research because that would dilute the story that prestigious journals love naturally and his rival, Sciencethey want to say it.

This is important because it is extremely important for scientists to be published in leading journals; in many ways these are factors of success in an academic career. And the editors of these journals have made it very clear, both in what they publish and in what they reject, that they want climate papers to support certain pre-approved narratives—even if those narratives are at the expense of broader public knowledge.

To put it bluntly, climatology is less concerned with understanding the complexity of the world and much more interested in serving as a kind of Cassandra who urgently warns the public about the dangers of climate change. Although this instinct is easy to understand, it distorts most climate research, misinforms the public, and, most importantly, complicates practical decisions.

The fact that scientists take pride in publishing in top journals is obvious and somewhat understandable. But when these journals have a predetermined agenda, what kind of articles will they accept, the “miracles” I described in Why Are Africa’s Oldest Baobabs Dying? You guessed it: due to climate change! (with a partially Romanian explanation).

Coincidentally resonating with my own 2016 views on groupthink and its role in the global warming debate,[2] Patrick T. Brown offers a contemporary picture of how the balance of reporting in mainstream magazines is shifting to impose a narrative of political correctness:

This kind of framing, where the impact of climate change is viewed in isolation and unrealistically, is the norm for high-level research. For example, in another recent and influential article by naturally, scientists estimate that the two biggest impacts of climate change on society are heat-related deaths and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver of any of these impacts: heat-related deaths have decreased and agricultural yields have increased for decades despite climate change. Acknowledging this would mean the world has made progress in some areas despite climate change, which the group said would undermine efforts to reduce emissions.

This leads to the second unspoken rule of writing a successful climate paper. Authors should ignore – or at least minimize – practical actions that can counteract the effects of climate change. If the number of deaths caused by extreme heat decreases and agricultural production increases, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some of the serious negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we were able to succeed in order to make it easier? Of course you should. But studying solutions instead of focusing on problems simply won’t get the public or the media interested. Furthermore, many climate scientists tend to think that the whole prospect of using technology to adapt to climate change is flawed; the correct approach is to consider only emissions. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.

Here’s the third trick: Make sure you focus on the metrics that will generate the most numbers to support you. Our work, for example, could focus on a simple and intuitive metric, such as the number of additional hectares burned or the increase in wildfire intensity due to climate change. Instead, we followed the usual practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres [4046 ha] in one day

This is a much less intuitive metric and much more difficult to turn into useful information. So why is this type of more complicated and less useful measurement so common? Because it usually gives higher growth factors than other calculations. In a word: get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its deserved place naturally or Science and extensive media coverage.

Brown also does not forgive himself:

In other words, I sacrificed contributing to the wealth of knowledge most valuable to society because I wanted my research to conform to the biases of the editors and reviewers of the journals I planned to publish.

What is the “whole truth” that Patrick T. Brown deliberately omitted to see his work published in naturally?

Wildfires in California and other regions of the globe have other triggers as important or even more important than anthropogenic warming: wildfires, forest mismanagement, and power line failures.

In 2019 alone, the FBI reported 33,395 fires caused by arson. The following year, there were 39,851 human-caused fires in the US, an increase of almost 20%! In August 2023, 79 arsonists were arrested in Greece. We can write this truth for publication Nature, Science etc., is it more convenient and safer to blame anthropogenic warming?

California and the southwestern United States have suffered from decades of forest mismanagement, with forests suffocated by dead trees, undergrowth, and dry grass. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro