I realise that this was mentioned in the comments of my previous post, but I thought I would just advertise that I spent a bit of time last Friday chatting with Sam Gregson, who runs the Bad Boy of Science youtube channel. The topic was, unsurprisingly, the furor over Patrick Brown’s claims that he had to satisfy a particular narrative in order to get his paper published in Nature and the video is at the end of this post.
It was arranged at relatively short notice and we did it in one sitting, as I had to get to a farewell for someone who was retiring and then to a barbecue for our new PhD students. I’ve listened back to most of it and I didn’t think I made any howlers, but there are a couple of places where I might have phrased things slightly differently had I had a bit more time to think.
...and Then There's Physics 
It’s important to distinguish at the outset between concerted political efforts to orchestrate climate concern, like The Nation Institute/ Columbia Journalism Review Covering Climate Now initiative, which may have hundreds of corporate partners in the media at large, the UN’s included, and the spillover of that project’s collective taste into the sociology of science journalism.
Lobbying happens.
If you are to shoehorn in another What About thing, Russell, you might as well link to it:
https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/
Is there something that *concerns* you in that page?
Willard, what could possibly go wrong with a School of Journalism taking a million dollars from a chap who segued from White House Chief of Staff into hosting a PBS series entitled The Power of Myth?
Let’s put the climateball in the court of a NAS journal that knows a thing or two about the interaction of science ans advertising, like Science Technology and Human Values:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-great-american-climate-crank-debate.html
Russell,
Bill Moyers is indeed an awful figure. He led The Nation to a more progressive path, that is a smaller and smaller C-conservative bias. Worse, here’s what he said more recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers
Will we ever be able to forgive him?
Given The Nation’s magisterial role in Stalin’s downfall and the overthrow of the fur trade, how could anyone in Canada refuse?
Russell:
It had better. How else will collective (i.e. political) action to decarbonize our economy proceed?
Every collective action is a slippery slope, but common-pool resource tragedies can only be mitigated collectively. Whatya gonna do?
“Lobbying happens” – “It had better. How else will collective (i.e. political) action to decarbonize our economy proceed?”
I have some naive and unpopular notions about people in positions of trust and responsibility having duties of care. Even that, having commissioned top level science based studies in order to make informed decisions, that governments that did the commissioning SHOULD use them to make informed decisions.
If we are reduced to deciding whether to address the climate problem purely on the basis of popular opinion I think that is a profound failure of governance that probably should be considered criminally negligence. But that is just me.
Lobbying happens:
https://newrepublic.com/article/175488/meet-shadowy-global-network-vilifying-climate-protesters
Ken Fabian:
Er – it depends on who you think bears the responsibility for political leadership. The US Constitution enshrines popular sovereignty, under which the authority of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political power. The framers didn’t trust anyone who actually wanted power, so they tried to restrain office holders from acting without clear direction from the voters. We could try to hold every US Republican voter criminally negligent, but good luck with that in court. Morally, OTOH, even with all the gerrymandering and voter suppression, and all the fossil-fuel money behind popular climate-science denial, one must still lay the blame at the feet of one’s friends and neighbors, and finally oneself: we get the government we deserve. Electing Democratic candidates is necessary but not sufficient, to guarantee decarbonization progress! Political activism, including lobbying, is still needed to counter the denialists, and secure an effective voting majority that sustains decarbonization leaders in office. I doubt I’m telling you anything you don’t know, Ken.
/soapbox
Willard:
Gah! Another confirmation that organized climate-science denial isn’t just a conspiracy theory! Thanks for ruining my breakfast, Willard.
Everybody, check out DesmogBlog’s list of donors and donees!
Jesus H Christ, this ain’t just about climate. Oh and I hate ‘merica. In fact, if it were just about climate, I’d say, well fuck you all and I’m going home.
Fine interview, enjoyed it.
Steve Milloy is having a moment. He’s young enough to do a lot of harm.
The Right-Wing War on Clean Air: As wildfire smoke hit the East Coast, Fox News claimed it was “perfectly healthy” to breathe. – https://theintercept.com/2023/06/11/wildfire-smoke-air-pollution-steve-milloy/
Milloy … claims that the peer-review process is biased against corporate interests. Although he has a degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, Milloy is not, even by his own account, a medical expert. Nor is he an epidemiologist. But while it might be easy to dismiss him, Milloy has a knack for accessing power and attention. His recent media tour is a good predictor of where we’re likely to see conservatives headed should they regain control of the government in 2024. Spoiler alert: He’d like to see the Environmental Protection Agency go away.
In early 2020, Milloy was basking in the glory of multiple wins under President Donald Trump, posting pictures with his pals inside the EPA and bragging about “eating the greens’ lunch.”
Thanks for your editing service, Willard!
Brown has posted a very lengthy article on BTI about correcting the record on his Free Press essay, https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/correcting-the-record-regarding-my-essay-in-the-free-press . I have not read it all, although this line caught my eye, “My aim was to simultaneously criticize myself and criticize a broader system.”
For me, it still doesn’t square the circle with his earlier BTI essay where he writes, “Publication and truth are thus not synonymous—not even close.” https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/climate-change-banned-words/science-climate-change
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“Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters”
Very shadowy indeed. Amy Westervelt and The Nation Institute crowd seldom target anyone under 90, and their latest object of indignation died in 1988.
How dare Sir Anthony Fisher found think tanks without their permission!
I thought this Tweet captures it well –
https://x.com/BunsenGato/status/1701758093065875526?s=20
So let’s review:
Patrick gives the reviewers scientific reasons why he didn’t provide a more robust analysis of causality.
But after the fact he says that the reason why he didn’t do a more robust analysis of causality is because it would (in his view) lessen his chances of getting the paper published.
So his answer to the reviewers was bullshit. A lie. He gave the one reason and then later stated that the actual reason was different.
And in his worldview there’s no ethical problem with him lying to the reviewers.
So let’s review:
Patrick gives the reviewers scientific reasons why he didn’t provide a more robust analysis of causality because, after all, they are reviewers looking for scientific reasons not editors looking for clean story lines.
But after the fact he says that the reason why he didn’t do a more robust analysis of causality is because it would (in his view) lessen his chances of getting the paper published. that is, his primary reason was he suspected, from experience, that cleaner simpler narritives are more saleable than more complex nuanced narratives.
So his answer to the reviewers was bullshit. A lie. He gave the one reason and then later stated that the actual reason was different.
And in his worldview there’s no ethical problem with him parsing his answer to the reviewers.
So let’s review:
Patrick like most humans makes decisions for complicated reasons that are not always clear to him to outsiders.He may think he is doing something for one reason
while later he may decided that other reasons make more sense to him. So at the time he may have told the reviewers, I’m telling my story this way because of X.
which may be a reason he has verbalized to himself. “I married the girl because i loved her.” Later upon reflection he may decide this story does not reflect who he is and he may come to the realization that his motivations were not X. perhaps he realizes he married for money.
in any case. we tell ourselves stories to explain our behavior to ourselves and others.
I would note a few things
1. these stories change over time
2. that does not make us liars, it makes us unreliable narrators of our own inner lives.
3. we are unreliable observers of our own motivations.
4. motivations are complex and sometimes contradictory
so I dont find any privaledged text when it comes to explaining what patrick did and why he did it.
Steven,
I’m not entirely sure what you’re arguing, but – at the end of the day – Patrick made some decisions that led to a nature-worthy paper and presenting arguments to reviewers that convinced then and/or the editor to publish it. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Could have made different decisions that might have led to a paper that wouldn’t have been published in Nature? Sure, but that’s how this works. But, he could almost certainly have published that paper in a different journal.
So, does any of this indicate some concerning practices within climate science? Apart from it being the case that Nature/Science are clearly over-subscribed and you need to have something that will be seen as headline-grabbing to get published in them, I think not.
Steven –
Yes, you’re right.
It is certainly possible that Patrick, at the time he was responding to the reviewers, felt that his answer explaining why he wasn’t taking a more comprehensive approach to casualty was the appropriate answer – and only to later realize (upon further reflection) that he was fooling himself when he was responding and the real reason why he didn’t do so was because he felt that doing so would reduce the likelihood of getting his paper published.
In which case it would be uncharitable to say he was lying. And so I should have been less categorical and more conditional.
However, if that were what happened, then it seems pretty unethical for Patrick to not explain that precise evolution in his thinking on the topic.
Unless, of course, he’s that un-self aware that he experienced that evolution in his thinking, and thus wrote misleadingly about the whole affair. So yes, it’s theoretically possible that he’s just extremely un self-reflective, as opposed to knowingly lying or willfully being deceptive
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there is a lesson here.
in textual analysis people often appeal to external texts to explain what
authors meant.
1. the meaning of a text, say the second ammendment, is the “sense” the author
had “in mind” when he wrote it.
2. to get at this sense we may refer to “other texts” biographies, letters, legislative history.
3. author’s opinions about “what they meant to say” or “why they said it” are just another text.
of course we can read Patrick and turn him into a liar. all it takes is misunderstanding him slightly and then ascribing slight differences in meaning to mal intent
Steven,
Indeed, but he is the one who is claiming that he didn’t publish the paper that he thinks he probably should have published.
The strangest thing about this is Breakthrough’s implicit assumption that having their people publish in high profile journals will buy them street cred in places like The Wall Street Journal.
The first time I met the WSJ features editor, I handed him a copy of Nature with some correspondence of mine as part of my pitch. He examined it cover-to- cover with genuine fascination. It was literally the first time he had laid hands on a science journal.
All I can say is that, I am so glad I didn’t write a self published denier book about other people’s emails. Or even be at a congressional hearing run by lying liers and the lies they tell.
Steven –
> of course we can read Patrick and turn him into a liar. all it takes is misunderstanding him slightly and then ascribing slight differences in meaning to mal intent.
Is there a reason that you’re repeating this point?
I’ll repeat that indeed, I could have been wrong whan I said with confidence that he lied. I was wrong to do so.
It’s entirely possible that he believed what he said to the reviewers only to realize later that he was fooling himself, and the rationale he gave to them for why his work wasn’t more comprehensive on his analysis wasn’t the real reason. And that he later realized that the real reason that he didn’t do his best science was because he felt that by not doing the best science he would increase his chancds of getting published..
In which case, it seems to me the ethical thing to do would have been to describe that precise evolution in his thinking.
Unless he has very little self-awareness, and underwent that evolution in his thinking but doesn’t realize that he did so. Which honestly, would be kind of bizarre but I suppose can’t be rules out.
I’m hoping this is just alarmism. Otherwise “skeptics” are going to have to really put their noses to the grindstone to figure out how this is just “natural variation.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66724246
Apparently, I should do some work to try and settle the Patrick Brown affair. I also, apparently, snort and snigger like Beavis and Butthead. To be fair, when I watched it back I did notice that I seemed to be quite amused most of the time and I’m not entirely sure why this was a common response of mine (possibly, simply that I don’t often get interviewed on podcasts/youtube, so haven’t quite honed my interview style).
Lol.
There is “no limit” to the extent to which you, Dr. Rice, will misrepresent the facts.
NO LIMIT, I SAY!
I don’t want to be too precious, but it’s actually Professor Rice 😉 .
Thanks God there are folks around who understand statistics like John.
> Just survey the published literature (you might want to start with Nature) and count up the number of published studies that control for the non-climatic and then do the same regarding the climatic. If the papers are about equal in number then you can reject Brown’s allegations. If controlling for the non-climatic is prevalent then an explanation for such an imbalance will be required.
If I got it right, actually what Patrick alleges is that his paper wouldn’t have been published had it not focused exclusively on climate change as the causal factor in wildfire growth.
In which case, John’s proposed analysis would be useless. The relevant analysis would only need to show that there are papers published that include other causal factors. And that’s what people have shown to indicate that Patrick’s argument is faulty.
I don’t think anyone much argues that there’s a prevalence of papers that focus on climate as a casual factor, or even that there might be a bias in that regard.
But maybe if I understood stats like John I’d see how his proposed analysis would have value.
Joshua,
IIRC, Patrick has now acknowledged that Nature does indeed publish the kinds of papers that he suggested would be very difficult to publish there, but is still arguing that there is a bias.
Anders –
Thanks for that clarification.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable, to me, to argue that there could be (or even is) a bias.
Joshua,
Indeed, and I’m sure there is some kind of bias. Researchers know that Nature/Science publish papers that are regarded as ground-breaking in some way. This can also change, depending on what is seen as currently topical. However, there is a big difference between there being some journals that are very selective in terms of what they publish and there being some kind of pernicious political bias.
Another point I’ll make, which was also made in the Twitter thread below, is that ultimately it’s the researcher, or the research community, that determines what gets published. If there is a particular bias in some journal, then this can be influenced by what researchers choose to submit. Yes, there will clearly still be some who might try to improve their chances of getting published in a high-impact journal by submitting a paper that is intentionally crafted to try and satisfy some supposed editorial bias, but if the community objects to this then they can try to infulence the direction that these journals take. Patrick didn’t need to “play the game” he chose to play it.
Anders –
I would extend that further. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to allege there’s a bias in some journals towards publishing papers that highlight the risks of climate change relative to other risks (such as the role of wildfire management in wildfire growth).
But to address that issue it would be critical to assess that bias carefully and accurately, and not be drams queens about it.
And also to he reasonable about why such a bias would exist if it does. I’d guess to the extent it exists it’s multi-fsctorial. A sensationalism bias could be a factor. A legitimate issue would be the importance of highlighting a high damage function risk that plays out over a long time horizon. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s a political element – which would necessarily include a reaction to a pervasive phenomenon of politically-based dismissal of climate change-based risk, as well as a politically-based bias towards emphasizing climate-based risk.
I’m the end, imo, Patrick’s drama is just more sameold sameold, where legitimate issues and reasonable focus on those issues get buried beneath am avalanche of crap, in easily predictable and often repeated ways. It’s a shame that Patrick took that route.
Joshua,
Yes, I think I said something along those lines in the podcast. Even if one can demonstrate some kind of bias, it doesn’t immediately indicate a problem. Maybe it’s perfectly reasonable that climate scientists have spent some time looking at how climate change (as measured by temperature) might influence extreme events. Maybe it’s now reasonable to argue that this focus should change to also highlight how we might improve resilience and reduce vulnerabilities. This doesn’t immediately imply some kind of huge problem. Maybe it’s just the natural evolution of a scientific field.
Also, we are mostly focussing on climate scientists, who – as the descriptor indicates – are probably going to be looking at the impact of climate change. This doesn’t mean that those who study urban planning (for example) shouldn’t be looking at ways to reduce the impact of extreme weather events on local communities.
> John’s proposed analysis would be useless
In fairness, JR’s analysis may not serve any constructive purpose. As a mere counterfactual, it could still be useful as a rhetorical device to raise infinite concerns. It does not even need to be an analysis in any reasonable sense of the term.
Speaking of which, something not exactly unrelated, which I found by following the Bawan’s tweets to convince myself that he’s a Science Cop (he is one):
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01879-9
Cue to the “am I out of touch” meme.
Science cops are starting to look like the crypto bros who finally needed to reinvent all the financial tools and institutions we already got.
IIRC PB first claimed that he submitted a paper just looking at the correlation between wildfires and climate change because he had not yet completed his research and review of all the other factors.
Then he claimed that he submitted a paper looking exclusively at the link between wildfires and climate change because the bias of the journal Nature made that much more likely to be accepted than the more comprehensive multifactorial paper.
Cue the ‘usual skeptics’ having a moment claiming the bias would exclude any paper that found that other factors had a stronger link to increased wildfires. And that this was clear evidence of a biased propaganda for climate change being the preferred source of a catastrophic existential threat to global safety.
If PB had done the additional work to include other factors and climate change still emerged as a dominant influence I suspect it would have still been published and the skeptics would still have had the same objections. If such multi-factor paper are really less likely to be published then Nature is guilty of simplifying science to single effect = single cause epistemology. If the multifactor paper had shown an alternative clear link I suspect it may not have been published, or if it was there would be objections by the ‘global warming is catastrophic’ side.
Whatever the case, this is storm in a teacup about a single paper. What it reveals about inherent biases in the publishing policy of Nature is uncertain and dubious. What it reveals about the biases of the quasi-scientific audience that monitor such publications is rather more significant.