Weather Rant by Professor Art Horn, Meteorologist AMS

“What is necessary for the very existence of science and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself.” - Dr. Richard Feynman

Published at theartofweather.net

Tuesday September 5th, 2023

Love that quote by the good doctor above. It’s especially relevant to the story below! Be it scientific journals or from the sea of both established and fledgling media companies, they all have one goal it would seem and it’s not the truth but perhaps just part of the truth so that fits their predetermined narrative. Is a lie of omission really a lie or is it a willful desire to deceive (a lie) by appearing to tell the truth?

The story below is also instructive in that it should make one aware of the fact that the big government that is now in power is throwing BILLIONS of dollars at climate scientists and research facilities via the EPA, The National Science Foundation and a myriad of other federal agencies to propel their narrative that climate change is a serious threat to our future.

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Top scientist Patrick Brown says he deliberately OMITTED key fact in climate change piece he’s just had published in prestigious journal to ensure woke editors ran it - that 80% of wildfires are started by humans

Story by Lewis Pennock For Dailymail.Com

A climate change scientist has claimed the world’s leading academic journals reject papers which don’ ‘support certain narratives’ about the issue and instead favor ‘distorted’ research which hypes up dangers rather than solutions.

Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, said editors at Nature and Science - two of the most prestigious scientific journals - select ‘climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives’.

In an article for The Free Press, Brown likened the approach to the way ‘the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause’ of wildfires, including the recent devastating fires in Hawaii. He pointed out research that said 80 percent of wildfires are ignited by humans.

Brown gave the example of a paper he recently authored titled ‘Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California’. Brown said the paper, published in Nature last week, ‘focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior’ and ignored other key factors.

Brown laid out his claims in an article titled ‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published’. ‘I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work,’ the article begins.

‘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,’ he wrote of his recently-published work.

‘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.’

A spokesperson for Nature said ‘all submitted manuscripts are considered independently on the basis of the quality and timeliness of their science’.

‘Our editors make decisions based solely on whether research meets our criteria for publication - original scientific research (where conclusions are sufficiently supported by the available evidence), of outstanding scientific importance, which reaches a conclusion of interest to a multidisciplinary readership,’ a statement said.

‘Intentional omission of facts and results that are relevant to the main conclusions of a paper is not considered best practice with regards to accepted research integrity principles,’ the spokesperson added.

Science was approached for comment.

Brown opened his missive with links to stories by AP, PBS NewsHour, The New York Times and Bloomberg which he said give the impression global wildfires are ‘mostly the result of climate change’.

He said that ‘climate change is an important factor’ but ‘isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus’.

Much reporting of the wildfires in Maui has said climate change contributed to the disaster by helping to create conditions that caused the fires to spark and spread quickly.

The blazes, which killed at least 115 people, are believed to have been started by a downed electricity line, but observers have said rising temperatures caused extremely dry conditions on the Hawaiian island.

Brown said the media operates like scientific journals in that the focus on climate change ‘fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it’.

Scientists whose careers depend on their work being published in major journals also ‘tailor’ their work to ‘support the mainstream narrative’, he said.

‘This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper,’ he added. ‘The authors should ignore - or at least downplay - practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change.’

He gave examples of factors which are ignored, including a ‘decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century’. In the case of wildfires, Brown says ‘current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires’.

Poor forest management has also been blamed for a record number of wildfires in Canada this year.

But ‘the more practical kind of analysis is discouraged’ because it ‘weakens the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions’, Brown said.

Successful papers also often use ‘less intuitive metrics’ to measure the impacts of climate change because they ‘generate the most eye-popping numbers’, he said. 

He went onto to claim that other papers he’s written which don’t match a certain narrative have been ‘rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets’.

Brown concluded: ‘We need a culture change across academia and elite media that allows for a much broader conversation on societal resilience to climate. The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what’s been left out.’

‘The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish.’

ICECAP NOTE: See a telling media story on the deadly Maui wildfires real causes here and more here.
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