A climate scientist has admitted overhyping the impact of global warming on wildfires to ensure his work was published in the prestigious science journal Nature.
Dr Patrick Brown, the co-director of the climate and energy team at The Breakthrough Institute, Berkeley, published a paper last week arguing that climate change had increased wildfires in California.
The Nature study has been accessed more than 3,000 times online and was cited by 109 news outlets across the globe.
But in a blog and series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, Dr Brown admitted that there were other factors influencing wildfires that he had purposefully omitted – such as poor forestry management and increased people starting fires deliberately or accidentally.
He said he had found that journals would not publish climate studies unless they followed a specific “formula” and “mainstream narrative” in which global warming was viewed as the sole culprit for environmental destruction.
Nature denied it had a preferred narrative and said it was “considering the implications” of Dr Brown’s admission, adding that his comments reflect irresponsible and poor research practices.
Dr Brown warned that climate scientists often used irrelevant metrics to create “eye-popping numbers” or used periods irrelevant to modern societies.
He said he had discovered it was “taboo” to mention that global warming was often mitigated by technological changes and resilience. “The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative,” he said.
“Why did I focus exclusively on the impact of climate change? I wanted the research to be as widely disseminated as possible, and thus, I wanted it to be published in a high-impact journal.
“When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula I outlined here, my papers were promptly rejected by the editors of high-profile journals without even going to peer review.” He added: “This type of framing, where the influence of climate change is unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers.
“It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes to technology and resilience that would lessen the impact.”
Dr. Brown’s admission shows one of the many problems that exist around the whole subject of climate change and So-called academic research in general. Researchers these days start with the conclusion and then seek to select information supporting their views, ignoring contrary information or interpreting ambiguous evidence as supporting their hypotheses.
The whole “science” around climate change is almost like the atheistic liberal cult’s version of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Bigger and bigger claims constantly come out over the planet’s impending destruction and the end of life as we know it. This is, of course, untrue. Yes, we are seeing changes in the weather, and yes, some of this may be down to the actions of mankind.
But man’s impact on what is a natural cycle of warming and cooling that has gone on for aeons is overhyped, as is how quickly this cycle is happening and how damaging these effects will be.
In the present era, it is disappointing that those we formerly trusted to deliver impartial and rational assessments of information and evidence devoid of emotional sway have become the purveyors of misinformation we must be wary of. It is a regrettable state of affairs that we can no longer rely on science to sift through the clamour and deception surrounding different subjects.