Patrick Brown said that he “narrowly focused” his study because scientists are under a lot of pressure to get their work published in high-quality journals.
A scientist from California admitted that he “left out the full truth” about climate change and put most of the blame on humans so that his study could be published in a respected science magazine.
Patrick T. Brown, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and holder of a Ph.D. in earth and climate sciences, admitted in an online article in The Free Press, a blog post, and a series of social media posts that he changed the results of his studies to make them more interesting to the editors of the online science journals Nature and Science.
Brown wrote in The Free Press, “And the editors of these journals have made it very clear, both by what they publish and by what they don’t publish, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives, even if those narratives hurt society’s knowledge as a whole.”
Brown’s study, which came out in Nature on August 30, said that extreme wildfires like the ones in California and Maui were caused by climate change. Now, the well-known scientist says that he “focused narrowly” on how humans affect flames and didn’t pay enough attention to the complexity of other “obviously relevant factors.”
He said that his idea was because scientists are under a lot of pressure to get their studies published in high-quality articles and have to write descriptions that are interesting enough to be turned into headlines.
Brown told The Free Press that he is not “disowning” his paper by criticizing how he decided to write it, but he does agree that it is less “useful than it could have been.”
“At this point, you might be asking if I’m taking back my own paper. Brown wrote, “I’m not.” “On the contrary, I think it helps us learn more about how climate change affects how wildfires behave every day. It’s just that the study wasn’t as useful as it could have been because it was tailored for an important magazine.”
Brown wrote that the study didn’t look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as important to fire behavior because he “knew that it would take away from the clean narrative centered on the negative effects of climate change and make it less likely that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.”
He also said that bias in climate science “misleads the public” and “makes it harder to find real solutions.”
“Finding and focusing on problems instead of studying how well solutions work makes for more interesting abstracts that can be turned into headlines, but it’s a big reason why high-profile research isn’t as useful to society as it could be,” Brown wrote in an X (formerly Twitter) thread on Sept. 5.
Republican James Gallagher, who is the head of the California Assembly, said that leftists “cherry-pick data” to “fit their agenda.”
Gallagher told Fox News Digital, “Patrick Brown is saying the quiet part out loud: liberals are cherry-picking data to fit an agenda and pushing radical policies that raise the cost of living.” “Climate change is the Democrats’ way out of having to take responsibility for making our forests into fire hazards.”
Gallagher went on to say, “If they don’t take forest management seriously, we’ll see even more megafires that destroy the land.”
Republican Assembly member Joe Patterson told Fox News Digital that Gov. Gavin Newsom puts pressure on experts to ignore science and other important factors that cause flames. This is the same thing that Gallagher said.
Patterson said, “Republicans want scientists to look at all possible reasons for big wildfires, including climate change.” “The trouble is that Governor Newsom and the Democrats in the legislature want to ignore important things like the health of the forest and the amount of fuel in it. While they put pressure on experts to ignore science, our state is actually on fire.”