Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
In a controversial bid to expose supposed bias in a top journal, a US climate expert shocked fellow scientists by revealing he tailored a wildfire study to emphasize global warming.
While supporters applauded Patrick T. Brown for flagging what he called a one-sided climate "narrative" in academic publishing, his move surprised at least one of his co-authors—and angered the editors of leading journal Nature.
"I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published," read the headline to an article signed by Brown in the news site The Free Press on September 5.
He said he deliberately focused on the impact from higher temperatures on wildfire risk in a study in the journal, excluding other factors such as land management.
"I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like," the article read. "That's not the way science should work."
One of the named co-authors of the study, Steven J. Davis, a professor in the earth system science department at the University of California, Irvine, told AFP Brown's comments took him "by surprise".
"Patrick may have made decisions that he thought would help the paper be published, but we don't know whether a different paper would have been rejected," he said in an email.
"I don't think he has much evidence to support his strong claims that editors and reviewers are biased."
[...] "It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that Patrick felt like he had to be a willing participant in oversimplifying his work to have a career in science. In that long run, that is not a service to him, the field, or humanity."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Monday September 18 2023, @05:03PM (25 children)
The lady doth protest too much. I seriously doubt anyone was actually shocked or even that surprised. It's just that nobody likes to be caught with their pants down. But this is so common I doubt people even bat an eye at it anymore. Products, scientific reports are products in this regard, are tailored for the audience, for effect or to please the one that paid for it -- pick any combination. It isn't the way it should work but it is the way that it does work.
This is kind of shitty tho. For the co-author. Nobody likes to be surprised or backstabbed like this. The editor is just mad cause she got exposed and Nature are furious about their precious image as if this turns out to be a thing nobody will want to subscribe or care to be printed in their magazine.
That is so common it's the standard operating procedure. Ignore everything that isn't producing or supporting the results you want to convey. If you feel you have to mention it you put it someplace that most people won't even read it. Bury it deep.
So while he is getting some hate and some pats on the back I still wonder if this was career suicide.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday September 18 2023, @05:15PM (1 child)
Maybe. Certainly depending on how fair and open the entire science publishing machine is, certainly including Nature.
It might help a lot if Nature would open up, for review, their submissions with published / rejected status.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Tuesday September 19 2023, @03:31AM
Not at all. He's demonstrated that if he's purchased with grant money, he's like an honest politician -- he'll stay bought.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday September 18 2023, @05:18PM (2 children)
> So while he is getting some hate and some pats on the back I still wonder if this was career suicide.
Yes it was. Presumably he is near retirement age.
> > He said he deliberately focused on the impact from higher temperatures on wildfire risk in a study in the journal, excluding other factors such as land management.
> That is so common it's the standard operating procedure.
It depends. It's okay to say "wildfires increase by 25 % from climate change" even if "wildfires increase by 50 % from land management" is also true. *But* the article should say "wildfires increased by 75 % and 25 % of that increase comes from climate change". I would have no problem publishing such an article (although the article should quote statistical and systematic errors).
> put it someplace that most people won't even read it.
Well, if someone publishes an article in a field where I am interested, I will read the full article several times. If my work is derivative then I will often read the source article many many times.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2023, @09:17PM (1 child)
https://patricktbrown.org/about/ [patricktbrown.org]
Also, he's not old, at least by the standards of SN.
He has several publications recently about this sort of thing. He either has tenure or a job lined up with Exxon-Shell-BP,
(Score: 4, Interesting) by captain normal on Tuesday September 19 2023, @05:14AM
Also, "He is a Co-Director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute"---from your link.
About "The Breakthrough Institute" :
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/breakthrough-institute/ [mediabiasfactcheck.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Institute [wikipedia.org]
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Breakthrough_Institute [sourcewatch.org]
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore [harvard.edu]
https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/breakthrough-institute-berkeley-18109580.php [sfchronicle.com]
Not exactly an unbiased org.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Monday September 18 2023, @06:05PM (15 children)
Yes, its very common in Academic research. At the end of the day Scientists are humans, with lives, mortgages, costs and common human weaknesses. Academia is also very fad driven, almost like a popularity contest.
Very often results will be tailored in such a way that either makes it popular with the current thing, increasing the chance to get published and increasing the visibility of the authors, which is both ego stroking and results in more prestigious projects in future. Or it can be done to be pleasing to whoever the benefactor is, or in the hope that the "correct" result will generate increased grants for future research projects.
This is especially common in "soft" sciences where it is easy to tailor results (much harder to do that in a theoretical Mathematics paper for example) are heavily politicised and have a lot of of money being thrown at them, like economics and "climate science", so a lot of that happens there.
The main shock here is that someone deliberately admitted in public to doing what others do quietly. From TFS it seems he did it primarily as a protest against the very corruption of Academia I mentioned above, and it can be considered a career ending move. Either he has tenure and doesn't have to worry about a career, or he is near retirement and this is like a farewell gift.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Freeman on Monday September 18 2023, @06:09PM (14 children)
I mean, if by gift you mean, "the middle finger to the establishment" kind of gift.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday September 18 2023, @08:18PM
That is exactly what I mean, the best gift of all :-)
Also it draws attention to a wider audience the fact "science" is not above human nature. In the last few years it has felt to me that "science" has been elevated to almost be like a religion, that it is always right and you have to believe/have faith in it, which really goes against the one of core tenets of science IMO (that tenet being: question everything, you are not supposed to blindly believe in things).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 19 2023, @01:59AM (12 children)
This guy is 10000% more "The Establishment" than any editor at Nature has ever been. Can you even do a cursory google search on this man before declaring him your hero?
Literally a decade of working for right wing think tanks, the federalist, the NRO, the New York Times, Newsweek, every fucking major newspaper in the country. Why is a "economics policy expert" suddenly submitting authorial credit on climate research?
Can you engage in a moment's fucking critical thinking when your beliefs are being affirmed? Please? Can you not be a fucking child?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 19 2023, @02:48AM (3 children)
Actually, you make him sound like part of the counterculture. He is obviously going counter to the corrupt culture of the science religion.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/10/22/conservatism-new-counterculture/ [thefederalist.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 19 2023, @03:15AM (1 child)
I get it, runaway, you're a moron who thinks people doing bookburnings are pro free-speech, and people engineering massive lies to distribute across a corporate media system are free thinkers. You don't need to remind me of your role as one of histories biggest marks.
I get that you're too old and too dumb to ever admit that too, so it's okay, you can just harumph about "woke" or whatever your betters tell you to care about in reply.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 19 2023, @11:37AM
LOL, you should read Farenheit 451 again. Now, THAT's a book burning!
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday September 20 2023, @07:33AM
Reading round, it does seem rather like he is in the pocket of the oil people.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday September 19 2023, @03:16AM (6 children)
Sounds pretty counterculture to me too. And if you're not including an economics policy expert, then you're not submitting research that we humans can directly make decisions on. Economics is the elephant in the room when it comes to anything climate-related.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 19 2023, @04:59AM (2 children)
You cannot be this stupid.
No one is this stupid.
There's no way you think writing for a paper that solely exists because billionaires bankroll it as part of a well documented plan to control news coverage is counter culture.
The only reasonable interpretation is that you are a liar.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday September 19 2023, @05:30AM
What here is there to be stupid about?
Truth is an absolute defense against accusations of stupidity. Here, what you ignore is that the vast majority of climate researchers are funded by governments, not billionaire hobbyists.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2023, @08:09AM
I think you underestimate the khallow.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 19 2023, @04:28PM (2 children)
You agreed that economists are the new astrologers [soylentnews.org] not too long ago.
How can we explain this sudden shift in credibility?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 20 2023, @02:07AM
A: your credibility hasn't shifted in a good directly by that leading question.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 20 2023, @05:55AM
More on this. I find it interesting how the link you quoted doesn't support your claim. In there, I don't ever make that argument. That's the ignorance and poor thinking you bring to a lot of your arguments. I did some work and actually found a number of real world examples that you couldn't. I'll quote a few to reveal the nuance you missed.
In the above link: [soylentnews.org]
In other words, I argue against a particular ideological system, not economics in general. While some of the myths of Keynesian economics are fairly widespread (such as the belief that increased government spending ends recessions), economics is far more than a particular, delusional faction. I made similar comments about Austrian School economics for similar reasons. Here: [soylentnews.org]
Here: [soylentnews.org]
The point I hammer each time above is that conflict of interest is why economics and many other fields of science have trouble with reality. Scientists are corruptible just like everyone else and they're not that expensive for someone who wants an argument from authority fallacy or another toady.
Finally: [soylentnews.org]
One of the bizarre things that gets missed with the dismissal of astrology and such is that decision making is hard for a variety of reasons: choice paralysis and waffling, uncertainty about the outcomes of choices, not seeing others' viewpoints, refusing to accept a decision and regret, etc. A good astrologist can listen: get their client to think better about dilemmas they face, and more fully commit to the subsequent choices they make. Or they can say what their master wants them to say. That's true of economists of today as well.
A field of study isn't unscientific because of lack of integrity of some of the participants combined with conflicts of interest. It just makes truth seeking harder.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday September 19 2023, @01:32PM
As far as publishers go, Nature is as bad as they come. I'm not talking about Left/Right wing politics. I'm talking about publishers that are anti-consumer. Elsevier is right up there with #1 anti-consumer policies as well. There is also a very large tendency to feature biased content in academic papers. Whether or not this guy is 100% in the right, 100% in the wrong, or very likely, somewhere in between, is left for debate.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 19 2023, @01:50AM (3 children)
Don't worry he's been getting hundreds of thousands a year from a right wing [eppc.org] lie farm [sourcewatch.org](and just got a raise for this stunt).
I cannot believe how credulous you people are for this shit. If you weren't killing the entire goddamned planet it'd be easy to just laugh at how stupid you are.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 19 2023, @02:20AM (2 children)
Goddamn, you can see the exact moment he got hired by the EPPC in June 2021 in his blog.
He stops making sound refutations [patricktbrown.org] of denialist horseshit, and immediately dovetails into "but what if it's not big deal" [patricktbrown.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 20 2023, @12:39PM
To be fair, he was still refuting horseshit just from the other side:
[...]
Sounds reasonable. But he uncovers several huge flaws with it, though in a poorly written way. He discusses a study that attributes $67 billion in damage to global warming from an actual hurricane (Harvey). Here's the reasoning:
His first argument is a bit sloppy.
What's going on is that the authors he is criticizing engaged in a bit of circular definition. Even if global warming has an extremely slight effect, it still could result in the claimed change in frequency of rainfall events described and extremely slight effect on damages. While I don't think that the above is a seriously possible scenario, the point is that the way things have been defined and methodology used, you can always frame it as an expensive problem even when it's not. The methodology allows for large exaggerations in damage from a climate-enhanced extreme weather event.
Later he observes evidence that indicates such an exaggeration (though lesser degree) actually happened:
So climate change which increases flood area by 15% results turns a non-damaging event into a $100 billion damaging event four times more often? Doesn't seem plausible to me either.
I think the conclusion bears repeating:
In my own conclusion, this sounds like a rather reasonable article rather than merely a "but what if it's not big deal". I just don't see the alleged change in perspective you speak of. Methinks you don't either, if you were to actually read these articles in question.
One of the things that gets missed here is that he's consistently attacking bad methodology. Allowing that to become mainstream is bad no matter which angle it's coming from.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 20 2023, @05:11PM
If he started with the assumption that AGW was bullshit then "tailored" the article to remove that assumption perhaps he accidentally just made his article more accurate!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 18 2023, @08:16PM
Yeah
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Monday September 18 2023, @09:23PM (1 child)
https://patricktbrown.org/2023/09/12/correcting-the-record-regarding-my-essay-in-the-free-press/ [patricktbrown.org]
He didn't falsify anything, he just emphasized what the journals wanted him to emphasize. He was complaining about the system. I think his colleague was much more surprised at him saying it out loud than the fact that it was done.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 19 2023, @05:28PM
Have we considered the Null hypothesis? That his "tailoring" actually made the paper more correct in light of the data and that it was his original opinion that was wrong?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by DadaDoofy on Monday September 18 2023, @11:17PM
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-published [thefp.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 19 2023, @02:04AM (4 children)
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this meant that every word written in this guy's paper was completely full of crap. It doesn't, but let's pretend it does.
That says absolutely nothing about the hundreds of other papers reaching similar conclusions while studying similar things. It says nothing about whether the data he collected to draw those conclusions is accurate. It says nothing any data collected via any other methods.
The conclusion this article plainly wants its readers to draw is not in any way supported by the evidence presented. Which of course is why they don't actually draw the conclusion, they just present the information in a way that encourages that conclusion.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Touché) by khallow on Tuesday September 19 2023, @04:54AM (3 children)
Because unlike the alleged bad paper, they were peer-reviewed by a top tier journal, right?
Evidence that papers with unscientific flaws get through is an indication that other papers can too. Having said all that, this does seem pretty staged and low evidence.
I do think that climate change is very exaggerated as a cause of problems (for example, here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], and here [soylentnews.org]). There really is a bias towards blaming climate change, discounting the much more relevant causes in the process. But none of that gets illuminated by a contrived example.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 19 2023, @11:57AM (2 children)
So let's say you have 1000 data points producing a particular and identifiable curve, with an equation that describes it and everything. You then discover evidence that 1 of those data points is unreliable. Do you conclude (a) that data point is possibly wrong but the curve as a whole hasn't changed, or (b) the whole thing is bunk?
To reach conclusion (b), you have to decide that:
1. Any questions about the validity of a data point automatically means that data point is wrong.
2. Any data point of the curve being wrong necessarily means that all other data points are wrong.
The argument you're making is "Well, the standards for publication in Nature might be biased in favor of a certain conclusion, therefor all publications that have ever published papers about climate change must also be biased in exactly the same way." This is a ridiculous level of extrapolation from a single data point. The equivalent argument would be "Tropical storm Lee hit Nova Scotia, which means global climate change is real", which I'm quite sure you'd correctly conclude was wildly unwarranted.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday September 19 2023, @01:48PM
A responsible academic would note that there was 1 point that didn't align with the others and document it in their paper. Which is pretty much the opposite of what tends to happen.
Have you not been paying attention to the high profile cases of corruption in academia?
Stanford President Resigns for "Unusual Frequency of Manipulation of Research Data" [soylentnews.org]
Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers [nature.com]
The issue at hand could just be peer reviewer bias, though.
May as well just cut them out, then. (Nature was ahead of the curve regarding AI everything.)
AI peer reviewers unleashed to ease publishing grind [nature.com]
Oh, hey, they noted the peer review process is error prone, too. AI will definitely make it better, then.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 20 2023, @02:09AM
Let's say you don't. Then you end up with a different situation.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Coligny on Tuesday September 19 2023, @02:24AM
Remind me of an article in the lancet written by a pornstar and 3 stooges claiming that hydr0xichloroquine killed more people than zykl0n B or something…
And with still have armies of proud pronouns wearing braindead macaques on redshit (and here tbh) claiming that it’s the word of god himself…
Well… excuse…
The word of Science himself as Fraudci love so much to call himself while prepping his next speech to promote some random injectable catp1ss tested on 10 mouses and not even a single hobo…
If I wanted to be moderated by mor0nic groupthinking retards I would still be on Digg and Reddshit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2023, @01:55PM
I agree with this:
Proper science would be submitting at least two papers, one with the "tailoring" and one without.
If both get published then maybe there's no bias.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Wednesday September 20 2023, @10:08PM
"Patrick may have made decisions that he thought would help the paper be published, but we don't know whether a different paper would have been rejected,"
I think we all know a paper that doesn't "think correctly" will have much more difficulty getting published than the "think correctly" version.