Climate Studies Show ‘Consensus’ Claims to Be Based on Bullying, Not Science

The Caldor Fire burns in Eldorado National Forest, Calif., on Aug. 29, 2021. (Noah Berger/AP Photo)

Commentary

The recent treatment of two studies on climate change demonstrate just how corrupt the field of climate science has become.

One study that passed peer review, was published, and was subsequently cited in numerous other studies, was retracted a year and a half later by the relatively obscure European Physical Journal Plus, under pressure from prominent climate researchers and the climate alarmist media.

In the paper, “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming,” a team of Italian researchers in the fields of physics and meteorology reviewed the literature and examined the data with regard to extreme weather events. They found no increasing trends for heatwaves, tropical cyclones, extreme precipitation events, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and crop failures.

Based on this assessment, in line with and based directly on extreme weather data, they wrote, “In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”

Other researchers and the media didn’t like the study’s conclusions and applied pressure to the journal to withdraw the paper, which it, in a seemingly craven act of cowardice and intellectual dishonesty, did. The paper was retracted not because any identifiable errors were found in it, or any faulty data was included in it—in other words, not because it was false—but because, in the journal’s words, “Concerns were raised regarding the selection of the data, the analysis, and the resulting conclusions of the article. In light of these concerns ... the Editors-in-Chief no longer have confidence in the results and conclusions reported in this article.”

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As discussed by my colleague, meteorologist Anthony Watts, in a post on Climate Realism: “The paper had already gone through peer review and the Editors didn’t cite any specific instance of the use of bad data or the drawing of unsupported conclusions. ... When they let ‘the science’ through the peer review process decide, the paper was approved and published. When climate alarmism raised its ugly head objecting, the paper was retracted.”

Professor Roger Pielke Jr. said, regarding the journal’s decision to retract the paper by the Italian researchers, that the “abuse of the peer review process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicized as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes.”

Prominent climatologist Judith Curry also commented on the retraction in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying: “Reprehensible behavior by journal editors in retracting a widely read climate paper (80,000 downloads) over politically inconvenient conclusions. Journal editors asked me to adjudicate, and my findings were in favor of the author.”

A firetruck drives along California Highway 96 as the McKinney Fire burns in Klamath National Forest, Calif., on July 30, 2022. (Noah Berger/AP Photo)

And then there’s the second recent publication demonstrating the way that the pressure to produce research conforming to the supposed consensus that a climate crisis exists has undermined science in the field.

A paper published in the prominent journal Nature Communications titled “Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California” concluded that “anthropogenic warming has enhanced the aggregate expected frequency of extreme daily wildfire growth by 25 percent. ... On average, relative to preindustrial conditions.”

This claim was widely parroted by the mainstream media, for example, the Los Angeles Times, which wrote, “Climate change has ratcheted up the risk of explosive wildfire growth in California by 25 percent.” The L.A. Times ignored important caveats in the paper. The finding wasn’t based on real-world data but rather computer models, which, because they were inadequate to the task, were enhanced by the use of artificial intelligence to hindcast estimates of climate change’s influence on wildfire behavior.

Concerning computer model inadequacy, the authors wrote, “Some portion of the change in wildfire behavior is attributable to anthropogenic climate warming, but formally quantifying this contribution is difficult because of numerous confounding factors and because wildfires are below the grid scale of global climate models.”

What about those confounding factors not discussed in the study? Days after its publication, the lead author of the study, Patrick Brown, who holds positions at The Breakthrough Institute, San Jose State University, and Johns Hopkins University, made a revealing admission in The Free Press: The authors “left out the full truth to get [their] climate change paper published.”

In his Free Press article, Mr. Brown stated:

“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.

“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.”

Among the factors that Mr. Brown admits he and his colleagues ignored in the quest to get published were “poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: More than 80 percent of wildfires in the United States are ignited by humans.)”

Other factors, such as people and communities coming to the nuisance by increasingly building homes, businesses, and entire towns in areas historically prone to natural seasonal wildfires, were also ignored in this study. As Climate Realism has demonstrated repeatedly, these factors “can be just as or more important,” than climate change, as Mr. Brown admits.

There are several takeaways from these two instances of scientific bullying and not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Academics who don’t adhere to the approved narrative concerning climate change as defined by a cabal of scientific and media elites will be punished. But if you play the game as the cabal has set the rules, you can get published and your results hyped by the media. This only comes at the expense of an accurate and honest representation of the truth about the world’s climate.

As Mr. Brown admits, hewing strictly to the climate crisis narrative in order to get published “distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

The final moral of this shameful episode in the annals of the climate change debate is that to the extent there’s a consensus that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, as determined by counting journal entries supporting or disputing the claim, it’s ginned up through the manipulation of the peer review process.

Consensus is generated by pressure on journals and the selection of or pressure on reviewers to approve only papers that endorse climate alarmism. Horror of horrors, should a paper get through peer review that doesn’t adhere to the narrative, pressure is then applied to the journal to rescind or disavow it, with threats to get its editors removed or by prominent scholars saying that they won’t publish in or cite papers in the offending journal.

That’s not science; that’s Machiavellian politics in the pursuit of political goals.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.