Confession of a Scientist: To Be Published, You Have to Lie
Patrick T. Brown tells us everything we need to know about science
Patrick T. Brown is not a household name. At least he wasn’t until he posted an article in The Free Press, the blog of former NYT staffer Bari Weiss, titled I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published.
Roughly stated, Brown’s thesis in his text can be described as follows: if you are a climate expert and you want your study to be published in a prestigious scientific journal, you’ll have to cut corners and even, in some cases, lie.
This is precisely what he did with his study called Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California, which he submitted to the journal Nature with seven of his colleagues.
But why do scientists have to mock the truth for their studies to be accepted? Patrick T. Brown’s answer: “Prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, are the gatekeepers for career success in academia”, he tells us. “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.”
One of the obstacles that stand in the way of researchers is their number: there are close to six times more Ph. Ds awarded each year in the United States than in the early 1960s. Folks must therefore scramble to get published in a market where it is more difficult than ever to stand out. The result: they all prefer to avoid “dissidence” and so refrain from being at odds with the dominant discourse.
With respect to climate change, it is deemed unacceptable to state, for instance, that the primary way to deal with this issue is “by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructures, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning — or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines.”
Instead, what gets the seal of approval from the scientific community are policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, the authoritarian approach takes precedence over innovative solutions.
As for wildfires, Brown says that, in the United States, 80% of them are ignited by humans, which destroys the theory put forward by the media and politicians that climate change is the main culprit.
The phenomenon has, therefore, become natural: in scientific circles, “it is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.”
We take Brown’s word for it.
The disappointed scientist provides an example of the use of trickery in the climate debate with a paper that appeared in Nature, in which the authors estimated that the two greatest impacts of climate change on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. Now, according to Brown, the same authors never mentioned that heat-related deaths have been declining and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change.
For his own study, Brown says that he initially deviated from the ideological trajectory traced by the academic community before submitting it to scientific journals. No surprise, his text was rejected. He then had to close ranks to be published, just like most do.
Brown has since left academia, in part because the pressure on scientists “caused too much of the research to be distorted”, he says.
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