Whistle-Blower: Top Journals Won’t Publish Climate Studies Contradicting Alarmist Narrative
If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer — from
Canada to Europe to Maui — you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.
Here’s the
AP: ‘Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal.”’
And
PBS NewsHour: ‘Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise—Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.’ [emphasis, links added]
And the
New York Times: ‘How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.’
And
Bloomberg: ‘Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.’
I am a climate scientist. And while climate change
is an important factor affecting wildfires in many parts of the world, it isn’t
close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.
So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in
Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals:
it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.
The paper I just published — ‘
Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California‘ — focuses exclusively on how
climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior.
I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would
dilute the story that prestigious journals like
Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.
This matters because
it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the
gatekeepers for career success in academia.
And the
editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject,
that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives
come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.
To put it bluntly,
climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about
serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the
dangers of climate change.
However understandable this instinct may be, it
distorts a great deal of climate science research,
misinforms the public, and most importantly,
makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.
Why Is This Happening?
It starts with the fact that a
researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the
self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring Ph.D. students and postdocs, and of course,
accolades.
But as the
number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years — there are close to
six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were
in the early 1960s — it has become more difficult than ever to
stand out from the crowd.
So while there has always been a
tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become
extraordinarily more competitive.
In theory,
scientific research should prize curiosity,
dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to
uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value?
In reality, though, the
biases of the editors (and the
reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions)
exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields.
They
select what gets published from a
large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also
shape how research is conducted more broadly.
Savvy researchers tailor their studies to
maximize the likelihood that
their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.
Here’s How It Works
The first thing the
astute climate researcher knows is that
his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the
effects of climate change are both
pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is
not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but
through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at
reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
So in my recent
Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I
focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior.
Make no mistake: that influence is very real.
But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as
poor forest management and the
increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact:
over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)
In my paper,
we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that
including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did.
But I also 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.
This type of framing, with the
influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the
norm for high-profile research papers.
For example, in another recent influential
Nature paper, scientists calculated that the
two largest climate change impacts on society are
deaths related to extreme heat and
damage to agriculture.
However, the
authors never mention that climate change is
not the dominant driver for
either one of these impacts:
heat-related deaths have been declining, and
crop yields have been increasing for decades
despite climate change.
To acknowledge this would imply that the
world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change—which, the thinking goes, would
undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. …
Another way to get the kind of big numbers that will
justify the importance of your research—and
impress editors, reviewers, and the
media—is to always
assess the magnitude of climate change over centuries, even if that timescale is
irrelevant to the impact you are studying.
For example, it is
standard practice to assess impacts on society using the
amount of climate change since the Industrial Revolution but to
ignore technological and societal changes over that time.
Read rest at The Free Press
Alarmists Predict ‘One Billion’ Deaths From Climate Change In Hundred Years
Researchers from Canada and Australia have published a study predicting a remarkable one billion deaths from climate change over the next 100 years.
Citing a “scientific consensus,” the authors analyzed 180 studies on climate change and mortality, converging on a “1000-ton rule,” which means for every 1,000 tons of fossil fuel burned, a person dies. [emphasis, links added]
The article, published in the journal Energies, contends that “
a future person is killed every time humanity burns 1,000 tons of fossil carbon,” based on a calculation that “burning a trillion tons of fossil carbon will cause 2°C of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), which in turn will cause
roughly a billion future premature deaths spread over a period of very
roughly one century.”
Estimates of world population growth suggest that by 2100, there will be just
over 10 billion humans on the planet, meaning that
10 percent of humanity will die from climate change if the study’s authors are to be believed.
The paper also makes the stunning claim that if
humanity collectively burned the five trillion tons of fossil
carbon available in the Earth’s crust, “global mean
surface temperature would increase by up to 10°C relative to the
preindustrial era and
could threaten human extinction.”
“If you take the
scientific consensus of the
1,000-ton rule seriously, and run the numbers, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) equates to
a billion premature dead bodies over the next century,”
said Western University’s Joshua Pearce, one of the authors. “Obviously, we have to act.
And we have to act fast.”
The study also claims that it has been “clear for a decade or more that the
final death toll due to AGW will be much
greater than 100 million, or
one million per year for a century — an extreme best case if
current death rates from AGW miraculously remained constant at about one million per year (a level that may have already have reached).”
Since there has
never been a single death convincingly attributed to climate change, one wonders where the authors of the study
draw their assurance that
nearly 3,000 people are dying every single day from global warming.
Moreover, since total
weather-related deaths have been steadily decreasing by the year to a
mere fraction of
what they were 100 years ago, prognosticating
a sudden reversal in the trend would seem to require a
more scientific explanation than the
clever-sounding but ultimately untenable “1,000-ton rule.”
Finally, the authors of the study fail to address the disconcerting
fact that
nearly ten times as many people die from cold temperatures than from heat every year, which would seem to imply that
slightly warmer temperatures would result in fewer — not more —
weather-related deaths.
But not letting facts get in the way of a good story is a
tried and true strategy, one that has
proven especially effective for climate change alarmists.
h/t RO
Read more at Breitbart
ethics.harvard.edu
Figure 1 – Figure 1A from the paper Plant responses to rising vapor pressure deficit, magnified and annotated by A. Watts to show the Western U.S. and Canada regions cited in the Nature paper. Green areas in California and Western Canada indicate wetter conditions, yet these are areas where the biggest wildfires occurred.
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