The “climate scientist” in question is really a climate scientist: his name is Patrick T. Brown, and he is the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute. His article in the Free Press yesterday is essentially whistle-blowing on his own colleagues, and not only earns him an Ethics Hero designation, but also contains the Ethics Quote of the Month, which is both ethical in that he has the integrity and courage to make it, and a vivid description of unethical conduct that affects us all.
Here’s that quote:
“The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. 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.
“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.”
This is hardly shocking news, but it is shocking to have one of the scientists—Trust the science! Science is Real!-–who participates in fearmongering climate change propaganda as a means of controlling public policy stating outright what any objective and analytical observer should be able to figure out. Such objective and analytical observers are condemned and mocked routinely as “climate change deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.” His article shows that another description is warranted: right.
Read it all, even though it is likely to make you angry, and to want to shake the piece in the faces of your smug and ignorant climate change fanatic friends and relatives who keep citing “scientific consensus” as justification for expensive and futile efforts to avoid “Climate Armageddon.”
Other infuriating points:
- On journalism’s false slant in order to bolster progressive/Democrat narratives, Brown cites the AP, PBS NewsHour,The New York Times, and Bloomberg and writes, “If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer—from Canada to Europe to Maui—you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change…I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.”
- On why the “trust the science” blatherers don’t know what they are talking about: “In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value. In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.”
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On how what is supposed to be a factual analysis ends up as deceit, incomplete information designed to promote an agenda: “[I]n my recent Nature paper… I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But 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…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.”
- On how examining practical solutions to climate change is discouraged because it insufficiently alarms the public: “[S]tudying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.”
- Finally, he ends with practical solutions that he believes would result in the public getting a balances, accurate picture of the climate change phenomenon: “We need a culture change across academia and elite media that allows for a much broader conversation on societal resilience to climate. The media…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. What really should matter isn’t citations for the journals, clicks for the media, or career status for the academics—but research that actually helps society.”
Ethics Alarms 
Most major industries are not interested in finding permanent solutions to problems, since that would put them out of business. If a cure was found that would really end the scourge of diabetes, that would mean that big pharma couldn’t sell lifelong management drugs to between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 people in this country. That’s a lot of profit down the drain. If this country really attempted a “cancer moonshot,” that was more than just Obama giving Biden another do-nothing committee to chair to keep him busy when he wasn’t attending funerals and couldn’t fuck up consequentially, then big pharma would not be able to sell all these experimental drugs and studies while preying upon desperate families who wanted to keep their loved ones around for just a little longer and desperate victims who quite understandably did not want to die. And do you really think the fossil fuel industries want there to be an easy solution to being dependent on the fuels they produce and import? Of course not. It would put them out of business.
The same is true here, a whole industry has been built around climate change alarmism, an actual solutions would put that industry out of business. That said, I think they damaged their credibility a few years back when they started relying on a learning disabled teenager as a spokeswoman.
I dunno—are John Kerry or Al Gore any better?
Only in the sense that they are adults and would be expected to stand up to a debate.
In your criticism of Clintel’s climate change declaration on August 31. you roundly condemn Paul Clauser, “Citing him as an authority on climate change is like citing a legal ethicist as an authority on The Rule in Shelley’s Case.” I don’t know who this Shelley was (the poet?), but Clauser’s brief bio is displayed on the CO2 Coalition website, from which this quote is excerpted,
“Dr. Clauser has developed a climate model that adds a new significant dominant process to existing models. The process involves the visible light reflected by cumulus clouds that cover, on average, half of the Earth. Existing models greatly underestimate this cloud feedback, which provides a very powerful, dominant thermostatic control of the Earth’s temperature.”
That certainly makes him an expert on climate change in my book. What do you think?
1. Why is your comment on this post rather than that one?
2. I didn’t “condemn” Clauser at all, much less roundly I said that crowing about Nobel Laureates on the list was misleading when, like Clauser, the prize wasn’t given for anything related to climate science.
3. The Rule in Shelley’s Case is an obscure principle of decedents’ estate law from the English Commmon Law.
4. So you found a different bio than I did. Congratulations! Based on that, yup, I’d probably conceded that he qualifies as a cliamte scientist.
5. Now do the lawyers, teachers and soldiers on the list.
I concur with Roger.
This Paul person gives zero evidence or proof for his claims.
It’s also odd…is he whistleblowing on himself?
That’s part of the problem, Steve. The other part of the problem is rent-seeking. It’s not just the existing businesses that want status quo – it’s new businesses that rely on the government teat – wind power being one screaming example; it doesn’t work without taxpayer largesse. And the wheels may be coming off that wagon. See: https://gcaptain.com/orsted-ready-to-abandon-u-s-wind-projects-amid-challenges/
Steve-O,
While I concede that maintenance drugs are profitable for pharmaceutical companies, your condemnation of big pharma is somewhat misguided. The vast majority of new drugs are not discovered in Big Pharma labs; they are discovered in research hospitals, academia, and research organizations. Pharmaceutical company’s research efforts are geared primarily toward drug purification, clinical trials, and manufacturing process design.
In the US, between 1860 and 2020, life expectancy from birth essentially doubled from 39 years to 79 years. Medical advances, improved sanitization, and reliable food supply are three major contributing factors to this. Antibiotics alone are credited by some for adding 20 years to life expectancy. In the area of cancer, survival rates have increased sharply in the last half century primarily due to again three contributing factors: medical advances, increased cancer screening, and lifestyle changes. Anticancer drugs and immunotherapy drugs have played a large part in the increased life expectancy of cancer patients.
I suffer from psoriatic arthritis. Thanks to the recent biologic and other drugs, I can lead a reasonably active life. My mother, from whom I inherited the disease, was confined to a wheelchair when she was 10 years younger than I am now. Polio, measles, typhoid, smallpox, etc. are essentially not killing people in the US. All because of Big Pharma.
While we would all like to see all diseases eradicated, it is not going to happen in the near future. Humans are complex organisms. Understanding how they function and how to keep them well for a long time with a high quality of life is a perplexing science. It is a lot more challenging than figuring out the physics of a moonshot.
Many politicians and the public deride the Pharmaceutical Industry for its drug pricing. While I acknowledge there are unscrupulous and opportunistic pharmaceutical companies, they tend to be the exception and not the rule. There are always bad apples in any industry. Purdue Pharma and Mylan of Oxycodone and EpiPen fame are glaring examples of this.
I suggest the pharmaceutical industry profits are not obscene when viewed in perspective. According to NYU, in January 2023, the total market net margin was 8.89% and the average net margin for all industries studied was 9.34%. For Drugs (Pharmaceutical) and (Biotechnology), their net margins were 18.33% and 0.65% respectively. Most consumers might balk at the 18% margin, but there is no outrage from politicians or from the public for the banking and financial services industry’s 26% to 30% net margin. The government even subsidizes the Green & Renewable Energy industry whose net margin is 17.77%.
https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/margin.html
The pharmaceutical industry provides valuable lifesaving and quality-of-life-enhancing products but does nothing to sell themselves to the public.
You are absolutely correct on that last point. Unfortunately, it’s jerks like Martin Shkreli who get all the attention. There’s no way around the fact that he was an asshole who did a dick thing by significantly increasing the price of a necessary medication, although I don’t remember exactly what that was right this second. The wheel did go around on him and he found himself thrown into prison, where I hope he has been brutally raped a few times before they let him out, because he deserves it. Unfortunately, big companies just don’t get good reputations with ordinary people because frequently their executives are way overcompensated and frequently the decisions they make, although they are without a doubt usually sound business decisions, end up hurting at least some ordinary people. That’s just talking about the left. A lot of big corporations are not popular with the right either because they pander to the woke in an attempt to protect their bottom line. A big part of why FDR died when he did was that he had sky high blood pressure, and there was nothing they could do for him except rest. I’m sure a lot of people have avoided his fate through the use of the various blood pressure drugs that are available now. I get that big projects are difficult, and a cure for cancer is probably a very tough order because every human body is different and there are so many different kinds of cancer only some of which respond to x or y treatment. That’s why I sort of scoffed at the idea of Obama creating a cancer moonshot project. I’m not naive like my one friend who said that not one more dime should be spent on anything until we could be sure that no child anywhere in the world was going to bed hungry or cold or alone. It’s not that easy and we all know it. However, there’s always a question in my mind as to whether if a possibility existed whether the industry would pursue it seriously.
I’m not saying that we’re just around the corner from a Star Trek world where simply taking a lozenge will enable you to grow a new kidney or tuberculosis can be cured with one shot and 12 hours of rest, but there’s just always that thought of if we can manage diseases why can’t we conquer them? That said, I am not a scientist and if a real scientist who is not beholden to anyone can offer an explanation, I’d be glad to read it.
This isn’t the 1st time Global Warming Inc’s been caught with two ham-fists on the scale, is it?
Not exactly.
Direct quotes from the Rock Stars of Climate Science discussing legitimate scientific principles like hiding data, deleting/holding up skeptical comments, redefining the peer review process, attempting to silence skeptical research, ignoring/evading FOIA requests, deleting damning tax-payer-funded emails; all come under a basic heading: WHERE’S THE EFFIN’ WARMING???
(bolds/caps/italics mine throughout)
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
*Dr. Michael Mann: ”We can hold (realclimate.com) comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not …”
*Dr. Kevin Trenberth: ”WHERE THE HECK IS THE GLOBAL WARMING?”
*Dr. Phil Jones: “I HOPE YOU’RE NOT RIGHT ABOUT THE LACK OF WARMING LASTING TILL ABOUT 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like – half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!”
*Dr. Phil Jones: Bottom line – there is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years …this is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone … We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. DON’T ANY OF YOU THREE TELL ANYBODY THAT THE UK HAS A FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: “I did get an email from the FOIA person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails – unless this was normal deleting to keep emails manageable!”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”CAN YOU DELTE ANY EMAILS you may have had with (Dr.) Keith (Briffa) re AR4? Keith will do likewise … Can you also email (Dr.) Gene (Wahl) and get him to do the same?”
*Dr. Ben Santer: Next time I see (skeptic Dr.) Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: – ”try and change the Received date! Don’t give those sceptic something to amuse themselves with.”
*Tom Wigley: If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse sceptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”
*Dr. Phil Jones: ”I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – EVEN IF WE HAVE TO REDEFINE WHAT THE PEER-REVIEW LITERATURE IS!”
*Dr. Michael Mann: ”How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that anti-greenhouse science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on).”
*Dr. Kevin Trenberth: ”WHERE THE HECK IS THE GLOBAL WARMING?” We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. … ”
*Dr. Kevin Trenberth: THE FACT IS THAT WE CAN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE LACK OF WARMING AT THE MOMENT AND IT IS A TRAVESTY THAT WE CAN’T”
“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, SKEPTICISM IS THE HIGHEST OF DUTIES; BLIND FAITH THE ONE UNPARDONABLE SIN”Thomas H. Huxley
Kudos to Patrick Brown for having the guts to write this. But it is after all only talk. I think Ethics Hero is a bit premature at this point. He says, “And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish”. Yet Brown did not; indeed, he published a paper he knew was misleading because it could get accepted by these hacks. And he isn’t going to retract that paper either. Brown just laments that the paper [is] “less useful than it could have been.” I guess that’s one way to describe material intentionally misleading to fuel a narrative.
I know what I did was wrong, but here’s why I did it anyway… has got to rank pretty low on the apology scale. Of course it’s good that Brown is honest about all of this, especially relative to most other climate scientists. And he is now in a position where he can publish and tell the whole story. But Brown needs to own up to his past mistakes and retract the old paper to be fully ethical.
Exactly. He claims his paper is accurate and scientifically sound.
If he left things out of his paper on purpose that would change the conclusion of the paper, but submitted the paper knowing this, then he’s the unethical one.
Unethical one? No it’s the unethical ALL of them. The journals that only publish papers that preach the climate scare message, the reviewers who only allow papers to pass peer review if they send the ‘right’ message, the system which promotes scientists on the number not the quality of their work, and the government bureaucracy which only funds research that sends the ‘right’ message.
I had the same thoughts.
jvb
“And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish. ”
Less prestigious journals that will quickly get the reputation of Fox News and be ignored as “anti-science”.
I absolutely love it when people say things like the “serving as a kind of Cassandra,” meaning that they’re fear-mongers. Cassandra accurately predicted the future; it was just that nobody believed her. I don’t think that’s the point Brown wants to make about the climate scientists whose opinions differs from his.
*differ
Yeah, I see that misuse of Cassandra frequently. I wonder if he even knew the source of the reference.
Exactly. Climate hysteria is the opposite of “a kind of Cassandra”.
Cassandra was condemned to accurately predict the future, but nobody would believe her.
With respect to climate hysteria, the predictions have been inaccurate (the world hasn’t ended yet, NYC is not underwater, etc. we’re many years behind schedule), yet everybody believes them. Everybody means the “science ” purveyors, democrats, media, and republicans too afraid to counter.
No, John Kerry and Al Gore have no more credibility than a 15 year old, but never get the ridicule they richly deserve.
Geez, didn’t anybody else learn the story of the emperor’s new clothes as a kid?
Climate change is a perfectly natural geospheric process that’s been occurring for approximately 4 billion years, the time in earth’s past when it first became able to support life. During these many eons the earth experienced numerous periods of extremes of one sort or another. It was very cold, very warm, very dry or very wet. It experienced times when oxygen and carbon dioxide levels fluctuated dramatically. Human activity can indeed affect small areas for a relatively short period of time, but that’s about it.
To summarize, climate change is an ongoing planetary process and the only thing dumber than attributing it to human activities is the asinine notion that humans can somehow change or even halt it.
Those promoting climate this change hysteria have another agenda, and it’s one that will benefit nobody but themselves.
I’m not sure what to make of this editor at Science’s response: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12488605/editor-nature-journal-climate-change-scientist.html
I’m going to assume the piece will be withdrawn by Science because it omitted data. Which data, had it been included, would have resulted in the piece being rejected.