Patrick Brown recently left his academic post at Johns Hopkins University for a private think tank. He has just written an eye-opening piece for Bari Weiss’s Free Press website: “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” is the headline. The subtitle is: “I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.”
Brown’s piece is a blistering attack on the veracity of scientists, the media, and academic journals:
He says the journals “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.”
He also says “It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.”
Brown’s admission only confirms that when it comes to the climate change issue, it is all politics and propaganda and very little science. Very sad.