How to Get Published on Climate

This story has been around for a couple of days, but I don’t think we have mentioned it. Dr. Patrick Brown, co-director of the climate and energy team at The Breakthrough Institute at Berkeley, got an article on California wildfires published in Nature magazine. He then admitted that he had fudged the facts to get his article in line with global warming hysteria, so as to get the article published:

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.
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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 an increase in people starting fires deliberately or accidentally.

Anyone who pays attention knows that acreage burned by wildfires has declined dramatically in the modern era. In the U.S., acreage burned annually is down something like 80% since the 1920s and 1930s. To the extent that there has been a slight increase in the last few years, it is because of atrocious forest management practices imposed on the State of California by environmentalists.

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.
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Dr Brown warned that climate scientists often used irrelevant metrics to create “eye-popping numbers” or used time periods that are not relevant to modern societies.

And he said he had discovered it was “taboo” to mention that global warming was often mitigated by changes in technology 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 get 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 out of hand by the editors of high-profile journals without even going to peer review.”

Dr. Brown may have pulled this stunt on purpose in order to expose the biases that are pervasive in the world of “climate science.” In any event, he certainly has done so. The fact that a formerly-respected journal like Nature would publish an article blaming wildfires on “climate change” without noting the obvious facts to the contrary deserves to be considered a scandal.