Scientist says he 'left out the full truth' to get climate change wildfire study published in journal
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-scientist-...imate.html
PAPER: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06444-3
- - - - - - - - - -
Sabine Hossenfelder
https://youtu.be/bgKiMokFr3o
VIDEO EXCERPT (2:35 mark): The most depressing story of the week is a climate scientist who single-handedly damaged the reputation of his entire discipline. Here’s what happened. The climate scientist Patrick Brown recently published a paper about extreme wildfires and their link to climate change in the journal Nature. Now that the paper’s live, he explained on X-formerly-known-as-twitter, that while his paper considered climate change as one driver of wildfire risk, it did not properly account for other factors, such as changes in land use, vegetation, and human behaviour.
And he did this deliberately because he believed it would improve his chances to get published. He claims that there is a “formula” to getting published in high impact journals that requires focusing on the impact of only one variable. It’s not like he falsified any data, but he left out relevant context that he full well knew about.
Brown defended his action by saying that while considering other factors would have made for a more realistic and useful analysis, he didn’t want to “muddy the waters of an otherwise clean story.”
However, the peer review file for Brown’s paper is public, and even the reviewers argued against him. Editors from Nature have denied that leaving out relevant variables reduces the chances of getting published. The episode is fuel to the fire of climate change deniers. Who needs enemies with friends like this?
Climate scientist boasts about fudging his own paper
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/bgKiMokFr3o
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-scientist-...imate.html
PAPER: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06444-3
- - - - - - - - - -
Sabine Hossenfelder
https://youtu.be/bgKiMokFr3o
VIDEO EXCERPT (2:35 mark): The most depressing story of the week is a climate scientist who single-handedly damaged the reputation of his entire discipline. Here’s what happened. The climate scientist Patrick Brown recently published a paper about extreme wildfires and their link to climate change in the journal Nature. Now that the paper’s live, he explained on X-formerly-known-as-twitter, that while his paper considered climate change as one driver of wildfire risk, it did not properly account for other factors, such as changes in land use, vegetation, and human behaviour.
And he did this deliberately because he believed it would improve his chances to get published. He claims that there is a “formula” to getting published in high impact journals that requires focusing on the impact of only one variable. It’s not like he falsified any data, but he left out relevant context that he full well knew about.
Brown defended his action by saying that while considering other factors would have made for a more realistic and useful analysis, he didn’t want to “muddy the waters of an otherwise clean story.”
However, the peer review file for Brown’s paper is public, and even the reviewers argued against him. Editors from Nature have denied that leaving out relevant variables reduces the chances of getting published. The episode is fuel to the fire of climate change deniers. Who needs enemies with friends like this?
Climate scientist boasts about fudging his own paper