Dr. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist and the co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at the Breakthrough Institute, revealed recently in a paper relating to wildfires he recently published that he purposefully omitted information that did not fit the narrative of climate alarmism. Brown claimed it was necessary to do this to have any chance of being published in any peer-reviewed science journal.
While many of us have suspected that this is the case when it comes to scientific papers about climate change, Brown’s admission lays bare the climate cult’s suppression of alternative voices when it comes to the climate change debate — and, yes, there is still a debate, despite what climate cultists say.
Brown tells the story of his recently published paper “Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California,” which was published on August 30 in the journal Nature.
“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,” Brown noted.
“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,” the scientist wrote. “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.”
And when those “gatekeepers” fail, the rest of the climate cult is ready to remind them and accomplish the same censorship by complaining, kvetching, and outright bullying to get such papers removed. Recall the case of the Italian paper that had the temerity to declare that we were not, necessarily, in a climate emergency or crisis. Members of the climate cult complained until the scientific media company Springer forced European Physical Journal Plus to retract the paper.
Brown laid out the situation when it comes to publishing climate science papers: “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,” he wrote. “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.”
So, the science journals are acting as cheerleaders for the politics of climate change instead of simply reporting the science. It’s not an earth-shattering revelation, as many of us have long suspected this bias. But, in this case, a climate scientist with no other ax to grind is finally admitting the obvious. And he doesn’t appear to be happy about it.
“In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value,” the honest scientist points out.
“In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them,” Brown concluded.
Brown admitted that, when it comes to wildfires, he and his colleagues neglected other contributing factors in order to stay true to the narrative that so-called climate change was the main culprit.
“So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior,” he revealed. “But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely.”
As a result, readers were left with an incomplete version about what exactly is causing wildfires.
“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,” Brown lamented.
Brown deserves credit. While he went along to get along in order to get the paper published, he displayed a great deal of courage in exposing the censorship of the scientific journals. We all suspected this was happening, now one of climate science’s own has exposed it for everyone to see.
