The Patrick T Brown Debacle - An Own Goal or Something More Sinister

 On 5 September 2023, the climate scientist Patrick T Brown published an article at “The Free Press” which implied that he had perpetrated a Sokal style hoax on the journal Nature.  His explicit claim was that an “unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper (is that the) authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change.”

 

Note the title of the article, “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” and the by-line “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.”  Note also that the link includes the word “overhype”, indicating that the editor had a different title in mind.  This is another claim in itself, although it doesn’t really appear in the text.

 

The paper he co-authored was Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California.

 

This all raises some key questions.  Who is Patrick T Brown?  Where does he hail from?  And are his claims reasonable?

 

Patrick T Brown is, among other things, a co-director of the Climate and Energy Group at the Breakthrough Institute.  This institute, established by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is focused on “ecomodernism” which tends to be in favour of using technology to solve problems – replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy (not entirely bad), but resisting anything approaching efforts to minimise current reliance on fossil fuels.  To be cynical, they appear to be in the “we don’t need to worry about climate change because we can fix it with out technology” camp of climate deniers.

 

If it were true that there was a real effort by academia to squash efforts to address climate change, this would indeed be a problem.  We should do all the research, research into the impact of human activities on the climate (which we can more easily moderate), the effects of climate change and ways of mitigating the effects of climate change.  However, there are journals which address different aspects of science.

 

What does Nature publish?  According to their website:

 

The criteria for publication of scientific papers (Articles) in Nature are that they:

• report original scientific research (the main results and conclusions must not have been published or submitted elsewhere)
• are of outstanding scientific importance
• reach a conclusion of interest to an interdisciplinary readership.

 

Note that they don’t indicate that they publish articles on technological developments (which is where much of the detail on efforts to mitigate climate change would be expected to appear).  However, there is a journal in the Nature stable precisely for that, the open access journal npj Climate Action.  So, the question is, did Patrick T Brown do any original scientific research into other contributions to climate change?  He doesn’t say so we don’t know.

 

Does Nature refuse to publish papers on natural contributions to climate change?  No.  Contribution of natural decadal variability to global warming acceleration and hiatus. Indirect radiative forcing of climate change through ozone effects on the land-carbon sink.  Admittedly this is old (about a decade), but there’s no indication that there is new original research into other factors that has been rejected.  There are newer papers on the effect of the release of methane due to melting permafrost, such as this one from 2017: Limited contribution of permafrost carbon to methane release from thawing peatlands.

 

Did Nature give any indication that they didn’t want publish a paper that talked about other drivers of climate change?  No, the opposite in fact.  Hi co-author, Steven J Davis (reported at phys.org), said “we don't know whether a different paper would have been rejected.  … Keeping the focus narrow is often important to making a project or scientific analysis tractable, which is what I thought we did. I wouldn't call that 'leaving out truth' unless it was intended to mislead—certainly not my goal.”

 

Nature provides visibility of the peer review comments, available here, and in those comments, there are references to other factors “that play a confounding role in wildfire growth” and the fact that “(t)he climate change scenario only includes temperature as input for the modified climate.”  Two of the reviewers rejected the paper, but neither of them did so on the basis that it mentioned other factors than anthropogenic climate change.

 

In the rebuttal to the reviewer comments, the authors wrote:

 

We agree that climatic variables other than temperature are important for projecting changes in wildfire risk. In addition to absolute atmospheric humidity, other important variables include changes in precipitation, wind patterns, vegetation, snowpack, ignitions, antecedent fire activity, etc. Not to mention factors like changes in human population distribution, fuel breaks, land use, ignition patterns, firefighting tactics, forest management strategies, and long-term buildup of fuels.

Accounting for changes in all of these variables and their potential interactions simultaneously is very difficult. This is precisely why we chose to use a methodology that addresses the much cleaner but more narrow question of what the influence of warming alone is on the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth.

 

We believe that studying the influence of warming in isolation is valuable because temperature is the variable in the wildfire behavior triangle (Fig 1A) that is by far the most directly related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and, thus, the most well-constrained in future projections. There is no consensus on even the expected direction of the change of many of the other relevant variables.

 

So the decision to make the study very narrow, in their (or his) own words, was made on the basis of ease and clarity, not to overcome publishing bias.  Perhaps Patrick T Brown was lying.  But there would be little point, since the paper’s authors write:

 

Our findings, however, must be interpreted narrowly as idealized calculations because temperature is only one of the dozens of important variables that influences wildfire behaviour.

 

So, that’s true.  Like much of science, it’s all about trying to eliminate confounding factors and working out what the effect of one factor is (or a limited number of factors).  In this case, the authors have (with assistance of machine learning) come to the staggering conclusion that if forests are warmer and drier, they burn more.  The main criticism that could be made is that Nature published a paper with such a mundane result.  However, the mechanism, using machine learning, is potentially interesting.  It could easily contribute to modelling – both in predicting the outcomes of various existing models and potentially by being redeployed to improve existing models (or create new and better models).

 

It’s a bizarre situation.  Why did Patrick T Brown, as a climate scientist, do this?  Maybe he has been prevented from publishing something in the past.  Perhaps his new institute (or group) has been prevented from publishing something.  That would be interesting to know.

 

Or is it something else?

 

Well, if you search hard enough, you can find that Patrick T Brown has posted at Judith Curry’s blog back when he was a PhD student.  And if you look at Judith Curry, you will find that she is what Michael Mann labelled a delayer – “delayers claim to accept the science, but downplay the seriousness of the threat or the need to act”.

 

Is it merely coincidence that the Breakthrough Institute for whom Patrick T Brown works, and his fellow ecomodernists, are also the types who appear to accept the science, but downplay the seriousness of the threat of climate change and the need to act, or at least criticise all current efforts to act?

 

---

 

My own little theory is that Patrick T Brown was not so much involved in scoring an own goal in the climate science field, but that he was attempting deliberate sabotage.