Article Climate scientist boasts about fudging his own paper (Sabine Hossenfelder)

[C C]

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
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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

[C C]

Not sure if this was intended to be here, but it seems applicable, regardless:

https://www.scivillage.com/thread-14629-...l#pid59788

[confused2]

The 'information content' of the story depends on how you spin it. I think Sabine is spinning it as (yet another) reason why people shouldn't glue themselves to polar bears.

[Syne]

The words of a true believer. Tell the believers in scientism that a scientist admits to leaving out actual factors to wildfires, in order to get published, and they just batten down the hatches.

[confused2]

The words of a true believer. Tell the believers in scientism that a scientist admits to leaving out actual factors to wildfires, in order to get published, and they just batten down the hatches.

My point entirely. My spin on the story is that it has been spun so you can spin ^^. In reality I believe any evidence of global warming (or not) is to be found in cumulative data (example here https://www.climate.gov/climatedashboard ). A hundred years worth of data doesn't make for much of a story so writers end up writing 'something' which (by accident or design) tends to obscure or conceal the 'real' data. To make money a story must have either some intrinsic value (entertainment?) or can be used to attract (for example) sponsorship. Following the money (why one story and not another) is unlikely to lead back to polar bears because they don't actually have any money.

[Syne]

See. This true believer blames the media for having the gall to cover this scientist openly admitting to fudging the science...because that fudging fits the true believers beliefs, regardless of it misrepresenting the science. You see, to these ideologues, the overall narrative is way more important than actual facts.

[Zinjanthropos]

I don’t know how many climate scientists there are, not sure how many write papers as well, but trying to convince me that only one is an anomalous fudging author is asking too much.

[Syne]

Same.

[C C]

What's fascinating is that Brown deliberately threw his own paper under the bus to call attention to "strong biases in scientific literature".

As one of the co-authors pointed out: The paper was entirely clear about which factors were considered and which were excluded, they said, and there was no sleight of hand involved.

It's no secret that there are problems in science today (especially the social sciences), including many connected to publishing: predatory publishing, publication bias, publish or perish pressure, fraud, replication crisis, multiple retractions every week as documented by Retraction Watch, insufficient or deprecated peer review, statistical errors and fallacies, corrupting influence via research funders and industry employers, the coercive political policies of institute administrators, eroding academic standards, etc.

I guess Brown was just too hip or "woke" about the situation, thus leaving "sleeping" establishment colleagues and onlookers baffled by his "activist" behavior. As one put it: “I don’t understand what his issue is with his own paper. I find the whole thing really bizarre.”

It's vaguely reminiscent of that Buddhist monk during the Vietnam War who had gasoline poured on himself and had himself set aflame as a protest: https://time.com/3791176/malcolm-browne-...ning-monk/
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A climate scientist wanted to start a debate in academia. He set off a bigger firestorm
https://www.latimes.com/environment/stor...e-research

EXCERPTS: Brown said he "left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published," causing almost as much of a stir as the alarming findings themselves.

Brown wrote that the study didn't look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as, if not more, important to fire behavior because "I 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." He added such bias in climate science "misinforms the public" and "makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve."

On Thursday, Nature shot back. "When it comes to science, Nature does not have a preferred narrative," Editor in Chief Magdalena Skipper wrote in a statement to the Bay Area News Group.

[...] Still, Brown said, since he spoke out, conservative outlets have been lining up to platform him. He’s turned down interviews with “basically every Fox News show,” as well as Newsmax and One America Network, he said.

“That’s really unfortunate because that’s not the audience I’m trying to reach here,” he said. “I’m trying to reach my own research community. I’m trying to reform science from within.”

[...] “There’s a taboo against adaptation in our community, I think, because it’s considered to be in conflict with mitigation,” Brown said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, the bad people talk about adaptation when the right solution is to focus exclusively on climate policy that reduces emissions.’”

Brown’s complaints, however, have left some researchers cold. Multiple scientists disputed his description of the climate science field as being overly focused on findings that speak to the need for emissions reductions, to the detriment of other solutions.

“I don’t understand what his issue is with his own paper,” said Neil Lareau, professor of atmospheric science at University of Nevada-Reno. “I find the whole thing really bizarre.”

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Correcting the record regarding my essay in The Free Press
https://patricktbrown.org/2023/09/12/cor...ree-press/

EXCERPTS: I had been bothered by what I saw as strong biases in the scientific literature for a long time, and I started thinking and writing more about this problem as the paper was going through peer review. I gradually realized that I was applying a major double standard, criticizing other researchers’ papers but not my own. Over the course of this past year, and as the Nature paper was getting over the finish line, I decided to write a piece critiquing it. I did not think that my experience was anything exceptional, so I discussed the general incentives facing climate impact researchers and how these incentives make research less useful than it could be.

[...] As I state in the essay, I chose to frame the research question in my paper narrowly, to focus only on the contribution that climate change was making to wildfire behavior. In doing so, my methodology left out (held constant) the myriad of causal factors that affect wildfire behavior (e.g., non-climate factors like human ignition patterns and fuel loads) and could be altered in the future to mitigate wildfire danger. The paper is honest about leaving those factors out, so there is nothing explicitly wrong with the paper itself. However, at the end of the day, what gets communicated to the public is just part of the story and not the full truth.

This has been standard practice in published peer-reviewed literature that attempts to quantify the impact that climate change is having or will have on a wide range of weather-related phenomena and the resulting impacts that those phenomena have upon society. My Free Press essay simply acknowledged that I, like many others, make these choices, sometimes believing that doing so increases the likelihood that high-impact journals would be interested in the research... (Publication bias)

[confused2]

See. This true believer blames the media for having the gall to cover this scientist openly admitting to fudging the science...because that fudging fits the true believers beliefs, regardless of it misrepresenting the science. You see, to these ideologues, the overall narrative is way more important than actual facts.

Oh what a tangled web we weave..