A climate change scientist has stated that academic journals reject papers that don’t support “certain narratives” about the issue.
Patrick T Brown, a doctor of earth and climate sciences, said editors at academic journals choose what papers to publish, tending to focus on dangers rather than providing solutions.
Brown admitted that he deliberately omitted a key fact in his piece on climate change so that it would get published in Nature, an academic journal.
The paper, which is about wildfires in California, focused solely on how climate change causes wildfires, and paid no attention to other key factors.
He spoke about the issue in his article called ‘I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published’
Reuters
He spoke about his choice to censor his own work in an article titled "I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published".
“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,” he wrote.
“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."
He continued: “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."
Brown, a lecturer at John Hopkins University, also compared the selection process which requires self-omission, to the media’s portrayal of the Hawaiian wildfires.
He called out the media for focusing solely on climate change as the cause of the fires, when 80 per cent of wildfires are ignited by humans, according to research.
Brown agreed that climate change was an important factor, but it wasn’t the sole reason, contrary to the media’s portrayal.
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The wildfires in Maui killed at least 115 people
Reuters
The blazes in Maui, which killed at least 115 people, are suspected to have been started by an electricity line.
However others believe that rising temperatures are what triggered the flames.
Brown referenced stories by AP, PBS NewsHour, The New York Times and Bloomberg, which he criticised for focusing solely on climate change, as it “fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it”.
The doctor of earth and climate sciences pointed to forest management as a key reason for the fires.
He said: “Current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires”.
A spokesperson for Nature said: “Our editors make decisions based solely on whether research meets our criteria for publication – original scientific research (where conclusions are sufficiently supported by the available evidence), of outstanding scientific importance, which reaches a conclusion of interest to a multidisciplinary readership.”
