The Telegraph, September 8, 2023, Matt Ridley
Patrick Brown, the co-director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California, has blown the whistle on an open secret about climate science: it’s biased in favour of alarmism. He published a paper in Nature magazine on the effect of climate change on wildfires. In it he told the truth: there was an effect. But not the whole truth: other factors play a big role in fires too. On Maui, the failure of the electric utility to manage vegetation along power lines was a probable cause of the devastating recent fires, but climate change proved a convenient excuse.
Editors at journals such as Nature seem to prefer publishing simplistic, negative news and speculation about climate change. “It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility,” wrote Brown. So, after learning this lesson the hard way when his nuanced papers were rejected, he adapted his latest to suit their apparent prejudices – and it was published. Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, responded by trying to shoot the messenger, criticising Brown’s deception as “poor research practices”.
We have known for years that distinguished scientists who think that global warming is a problem but not a “crisis” get ostracised, cancelled or rejected by peer reviewers. Meanwhile, even the most trivial study that comes to an alarmist conclusion – such as a notorious one that found fish behaviour to be affected by carbon dioxide – gets rushed into print and celebrated in the media. Junior scientists notice and tailor their texts accordingly.
One of the biggest measurable impacts of increased carbon dioxide is global greening – the recent increase in green vegetation on the planet, equivalent to twice the area of the United States and counting. But as I discovered when I broke a story on this in 2015, pointing this out brings a hail of professorial hate down on your head. I was even singled out in a Boston University press release for daring to suggest that more green vegetation might not be bad news.
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