OPINION
Anyone who prattles about a “climate emergency”, or that climate change is an existential threat to life on Earth, almost certainly hasn’t read the scientific literature. Instead, they’re relying solely on the mainstream media, who are parroting press releases, written by activists, for politicians.
Anyone who thinks that even the scientific literature, at this point, is the purely disinterested pursuit of facts, almost certainly has no experience of science in practise, or scientists. Especially over the last couple of decades. They’ve never, for instance, sat in on a science symposium where scientists and their media minders openly discussed how to spin their work to fit the climate alarmist narrative. Nor have they talked to scientists who confess that they secretly keep their true thoughts to themselves so as not to kill their careers.
Put bluntly, climate alarmism is the worst thing to happen to science since Galileo or Lysenko. An institution already in crisis on multiple fronts, from a broken peer-review system to a replication crisis and a corrupted publication industry, has been been perverted by demented political activism.
I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over 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.
What follows is a depressing and eye-opening (if you weren’t already aware of just how often what the writer describes actually happens) insight into the corruption of science by climate activism.
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.
This is, in fact, what Steven Schneider championed as so-called “post-normal science”. Schneider was absolutely clear what the game was: suppressing rigorous scientific activism in favour of political influence-peddling.
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.
A large part of the problem is that the university-industrial complex is churning out PhDs in unprecedented numbers (six times more today than in the early 1960s). To get noticed and further their careers, those PhDs have to get published in as prestigious a journal as possible. But those journals have been entirely captured by the Long March left, who act as gatekeepers of what is allowed to be said.
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 […]
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.
If they don’t, they only have to look at what’s happened to distinguished climate scientists like Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, Willy Soon, and many more, who’ve dared dissent from the orthodoxy. Mocked, vilified, un-personed.
Those were established scientists, with long and distinguished careers behind them. What up-and-coming is going to dare risk being seen as a heretic?
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.
So, researchers deliberately ignore or downplay evidence that is counter to the alarmist narrative. At the same time, the most extreme, even if implausible, numbers are hyped as loudly as possible. In a more truthful scientific world, this would be decried for what it is: cherry-picking, data massaging. Once heinous scientific crimes, are now the norm.
Why are otherwise honest scientists doing what even they admit is wrong?
The answer is simple: I wanted the research to be published in the highest profile venue possible. When I began the research for this paper in 2020, I was a new assistant professor needing to maximize my prospects for a successful career. When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets.
So, what’s the solution? Part of it might be to simply walk away from the ivory towers.
I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted. Now, as a member of a private nonprofit research center, The Breakthrough Institute, I feel much less pressure to mold my research to the preferences of prominent journal editors and the rest of the field.
The Free Press
When I first wrote about bulldozing the universities, I was half-joking. With each passing year, I’m joking less and less.