Creating external costs
Coming off very much as a disgruntled ex-academic, the Breakthrough Institute's Patrick Brown recently blew his top over what some might interpret as frustration about failure to place enough articles on their own merit into "prestige" journals. Brown decided to deal with that by tactical expediency, leaving him feeling squeamish and seeking to explain and justify himself— by smearing his former colleagues in research. Brown vents his pent-up feelings in an op-ed which has poured like sweet music into the desperately thirsty and pathetically grateful ears of climate science deniers spanning the globe.
We'll be hearing echoes of Brown's impulsively emotional blurt for a very long time given that workable material for climate contrarians to repeat is scanty— meaning Brown has caused durable material harm to climate progress. It's to no good end. There's no silver lining here, no net gain, no legitimate cause being promoted; Brown's opinions are easily shown as factually incorrect.
Brown's screed hinges on a set of bold claims in connection with a paper recently published in Nature for which he was lead author. The underpinnings of Brown's assertions are that he's juiced his work into rare success by employing deceptive practices. He frames his argument as a mea culpa, belated regret over choices he freely made and apparently would now like to excuse by scapegoating bystanders— another risky choice. From his anecdotal self-imposed experience through creating an outlier report, Brown concludes that he "knows" things:
"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."
"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."
"The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative..."
"...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 is long on accusations but comes up short on evidence, in common with previous variations on a broad theme we've often heard: "climate science and academic peer review are suborned by a cabal of [globalists] [communists] [progressives] [other conspiratorial hobbyhorse]." And scientists, of course. We've already read these scripts and "scientists are corrupt" is boringly familiar— and wrong.
Osteoporotic rhetorical skeleton
What's Brown offering in his personal interpretation of "they're all in it for..." beyond decorated splutter? Less than nothing.
It's possible to cherrypick for rhetorical purposes, of course. Brown offers a hopeful smoking gun by trashing another paper in Nature.
"... the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change."
Of course they don't. These things are not the topic of the paper, which is explicitly intended to be a distillation of damages specifically attributable to CO2. Ask yourself: would a paper quantifying impacts of failing to use seatbelts swerve into a discussion of people falling from ladders and how fall arrestors might help with that, because both situations involve sudden stops on hard surfaces? No. Tangential irrelevancies are simply a distraction; there's no need to invent a nefarious purpose explaining "we're sticking with our advertised topic."
Continuing in a polemical vein, Brown incompetently lodges an accusation by implication:
"...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. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)"
"Startling?" Forest management practics as well as human ignition sources are frequently acknowledged and discussed in a list (see below) of published academic articles we very easily produced, each often in plain sight without even passing through abstracts. What's truly startling is how Brown is telling us nothing anybody faintly acquainted with this topic doesn't already know, information easily found in all the appropriate places needed for a full picture of wildfire and climate change. Leaving aside academic literature, it's mundanely routine for readers of newspapers to read of human factors other than climate change involved in wildfire. In sum, what looks like attempted cognitive shortcircuit by gaslighting.
Solipsistic tautology fails to describe climate science
Brown's "I know" is pure speculation, a set of unfalsifiable claims marching in company with an army of other silly conspiracy theories about climate science and climate scientists. Meanwhile, if we remember that we're in a world of facts as opposed to overheated imagination, there's plenty of actual history we can use to evaluate Brown's indictment. Even assuming we're hearing a forthright description of his Nature paper's circumstances, we can see that Brown's work is a distinct outlier compared to most of what appears in an overall bibliography of typical related reports.
Below is a partial (life is short) inventory of papers published over the past three years which deal with wildfire and climate and that happened to be included in our weekly New Research listing. The listing was derived from a dump of our database of articles including "fire" in the title, narrowing results on general relevance to the topic at hand, namely wildfire and climate change. Brief scrutiny reveals that they consistently fail to fit Brown's disturbing narrative and worldview. Despite his urgency to project his own perspective (and self-admitted apparent misbehavior) onto the habits of the scientific community at large, none of these papers reflect what he purports to be standard operating procedure.
In this sample of reports we can see a common thread: climate change is a factor in wildfire among many others, is a growing component as we'd expect, and it's normal and ubiquitous that researchers acknowledge complications of wildfire factor attribution and weighting.
As with the example above where Brown wishes researchers would diverge from their topic and dive into happy-talk about good things that might happen, we don't see these articles serving the role of incoherent melanges of fresh research results and wishful thinking. If they did, they'd be rejected for the obvious reasons that time and space don't need to be wasted in that way, and that popular literature is the better avenue for such mixtures.
Climate research barycenter misidentified
Brown seems particularly fixated on "prestige" journals, an impoverished and myopic perspective personal to himself and unreflective of the center of gravity of academic research on climate, which as with our solar system doesn't lie in the most massive shiny object in plain view. Our quick list includes articles from Nature's own journal family collection and an example from AAAS Science, but the vast majority of climate-related research is published in other journals such as Geophysical Research Letters and JGR Atmospheres. These journals don't operate in hermetic isolation from one another; reviewers and editors alike are found wearing many hats in many places. It's not remotely likely that a particular bent of bias could be maintained in some journals while others are chosen to be unaffected. As with so many other conspiracy ideations, Brown's includes too many moving parts to be plausible.
Leaving aside comically implausible logistical mechanics of Brown's claims of systemic bias, it's trivially easy to find deflating examples from his favorite scapegoat Nature, leaving his imaginary scenario hanging without support. Readers may take a look for themselves, but meanwhile our quick survey of Nature articles over the past five years includes many blatantly obvious disproofs, such as Marine heatwaves are not a dominant driver of change in demersal fishes and Forced changes in the Pacific Walker circulation over the past millennium, both published only last month and of course easily visible to anybody not trapped in a bubble of motivated reasoning.
So, we can see that Brown's perceptions and choices of strategies and tactics as key means of achieving publication success are belied in black and white. His hypothesis of a tacit conspiracy to distort scientific reports on climate change is factually incorrect and dipping far into deeply absurd.
With 37 recent contradictory examples so readily available (including some glossy journals of the type in which he ironically yearns to appear) it seems that Brown's unoriginal personal take on climate science conspiracy is full of holes, one way or another. A better and more productive course for Brown might be to submit articles reporting research on topics of genuine interest to him in publications with a natural fit, even though doing so might mean they're published in more usefully appropriate journals such as Nature Climate Change rather than the generalist Nature, where findings from a plethora of fields jostle for limited attention.
Missing the forest for the trees
Is there anything substantive in Brown's plaint? He asks "So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause?" That's easy to answer, but it has nothing to do with the formal editorial or review processes of journals. Brown doesn't seem to understand but it's important for the rest of us to remember: large publishers maintain vigorous and competent press offices; what we see emerging into popular view in mass media is indeed certainly selected and styled as catnip. Battery chemistry and human health sciences are also reliable fodder for flaks. But journal press offices don't accept, review and publish research investigation reports. Assuming we're not looking at a persuasive economy of truth, Brown's expressed ignorance of the media food chain leads him into sloppy slander.
Recent routinely circumspect research reports on climate change in connnection with wildfire:
Abrupt, climate-induced increase in wildfires in British Columbia since the mid-2000s, Parisien et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-023-00977-1
Anthropogenic climate change impacts exacerbate summer forest fires in California, Turco et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2213815120
Assessing the role of compound drought and heatwave events on unprecedented 2020 wildfires in the Pantanal, Libonati et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/ac462e
Atmospheric variability contributes to increasing wildfire weather but not as much as global warming, Diffenbaugh et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2117876118
Bottom-up drivers of future fire regimes in western boreal North America, Foster et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1088/1748-9326/ac4c1e
Causes and consequences of eastern Australia's 2019-20 season of mega-fires, Nolan et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.14987
Causes of the Widespread 2019–2020 Australian Bushfire Season, Deb et al., Earth's Future 10.1029/2020ef001671
Climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme autumn wildfire conditions across California, Goss et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/ab83a7
Climate regime shift and forest loss amplify fire in Amazonian forest, Xu et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.15279
Climate, fuel, and land use shaped the spatial pattern of wildfire in California's Sierra Nevada, Chen et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 10.1029/2020jg005786
Climate-driven Mediterranean fire hazard assessments for 2020–2100 on the light of past millennial variability, Lestienne et al., Climatic Change 10.1007/s10584-021-03258-y
Climatology and trend analysis (1987 – 2016) of fire weather in the Euro-Mediterranean, Giannaros et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.6701
Contrasting the role of human- and lightning-caused wildfires on future fire regimes on a Central Oregon landscape, Barros et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/ac03da
Fires prime terrestrial organic carbon for riverine export to the global oceans, Jones et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-020-16576-z
How climate change and fire exclusion drive wildfire regimes at actionable scales, Hanan et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/abd78e
Human-caused fires release more carbon than lightning-caused fires in the conterminous United States, Liu & Yang, Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/abcbbc
Impacts of California’s climate-relevant land use policy scenarios on terrestrial carbon emissions (CO 2 and CH 4 ) and wildfire risk, Simmonds et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/abcc8d
Increased extreme fire weather occurrence in southeast Australia and related atmospheric drivers, Richardson et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2021.100397
Increasing large wildfires over the western United States linked to diminishing sea ice in the Arctic, Zou et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-021-26232-9
Increasing synchronous fire danger in forests of the western United States, Abatzoglou et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2020gl091377
Large wildfire driven increases in nighttime fire activity observed across CONUS from 2003–2020, Freeborn et al., Remote Sensing of Environment Open Access 10.1016/j.rse.2021.112777
Letter to the editor on “Nonlinear dynamics of fires in Africa over recent decades controlled by precipitation”, Zubkova & Giglio, Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.16021
Meteorological environments associated with California wildfires and their potential roles in wildfire changes during 1984-2017, Dong et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 10.1029/2020jd033180
Nonlinear dynamics of fires in Africa over recent decades controlled by precipitation, Wei et al., Global Change Biology Open Access 10.1111/gcb.15190
On the prevalence of forest fires in Spain, Boccard, Natural Hazards Open Access pdf 10.1007/s11069-022-05384-x
Projected increases in western US forest fire despite growing fuel constraints, Abatzoglou et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-021-00299-0
Quantifying contributions of natural variability and anthropogenic forcings on increased fire weather risk over the western United States, Zhuang et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2111875118
Record-setting climate enabled the extraordinary 2020 fire season in the western United States, Higuera & Abatzoglou, Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.15388
Relationships of climate, human activity, and fire history to spatiotemporal variation in annual fire probability across California, Park et al., PLOS ONE Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pone.0254723
Response to concerns about the African fire trends controlled by precipitation over recent decades, Wei et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.16020
The Australian wildfires from a systems dependency perspective, Handmer et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/abc0bc
The effect of climate change on indicators of fire danger in the UK, Arnell et al., Environmental Research Letters Open Access 10.1088/1748-9326/abd9f2
Towards a comprehensive look at global drivers of novel extreme wildfire events, Duane et al., Climatic Change 10.1007/s10584-021-03066-4
Tree planting: A double-edged sword to fight climate change in an era of megafires, Hermoso et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.15625
Trends and patterns in annually burned forest areas and fire weather across the European boreal zone in the 20th and early 21st centuries, Drobyshev et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2021.108467
Wildfire combustion and carbon stocks in the southern Canadian boreal forest: Implications for a warming world, Dieleman et al., Global Change Biology Open Access pdf 10.1111/gcb.15158
Wildfire response to changing daily temperature extremes in California’s Sierra Nevada, Gutierrez et al., Science Advances Open Access pdf 10.1126/sciadv.abe6417
Posted by Doug Bostrom on Friday, 15 September, 2023
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