Jessica Weinkle has written another excellent post on her Conflicted Substack that is definitely worth a full read. Here are a few comments and excerpts from her piece.
The Underbelly of Climate Change Science
She discusses the recent Pat Brown saga and his riveting essay in The Free Press and notes how Patrick Brown, a researcher at The Breakthrough Institute, unveils the inner workings of climate change science, particularly how research is often tailored with the end goal of publication in mind.
“In a remarkable essay at The Free Press, Patrick Brown, a researcher at The Breakthrough Institute, gave the world a lesson on how the sausage is made in headline stirring climate change science. Start the research with the publication outlet end in mind.”
https://jessicaweinkle.substack.com/p/dont-hate-the-player-hate-the-game
The Role of Elite Academic Journal
Elite academic journals, such as Nature, play a pivotal role in shaping societal understanding of knowledge. However, the editorial practices of these journals have come under scrutiny, revealing the challenges of gatekeeping and the influence of external pressures.
“The editorial practices of elite academic journals such as Nature, matter for how society understands the state of knowledge and how we relate to the world. On occasion matters arise that bring attention to the fraught activity of gatekeeping at the journal and its broader family of journals.”
The Science Wars of the 1990s
The 1990s witnessed a significant clash between positivists, who believed in an objective truth attainable through the scientific method, and relativists, who argued that people interpret science through their values, culture, and worldview.
“The 1990’s Science Wars was a highbrow conflict between positivists and relativists. Positivists working from the lens of an objective truth obtainable stepwise through the scientific method. Relativists worked from the lens that people make meaning of things including science through their values, culture, worldview, and relationships.”
The Business of Academic Publishing
Academic publishing, once a noble endeavor, has transformed into a lucrative business, with global revenues estimated to exceed $23 billion. The drive for sensationalism, as highlighted by Mark Zuckerberg’s insights into online content, has influenced academic journals to prioritize research that can generate attention-grabbing headlines.
“Mark Zuckerberg, King of Clicks, explains that what gets attention online is sensational information. In debating the line between allowable online content and that which is forbidden, no matter where we draw the lines for what is allowed, as a piece of content gets close to that line, people will engage with it more on average.”
The Quest for “Excellence” in Research
The pursuit of excellence in research has led to issues such as reproducibility, fraud, and homophily. This relentless chase for high standards has resulted in a stagnation of innovative ideas, with researchers producing work that may garner attention but lacks genuine impact.
“Chasing excellence keeps everyone humdrum and producing not so interesting things that make good headlines. But it also keeps them employed and their prestige value growing.”
The Role and Limitations of Peer Review
Peer review, a cornerstone of academic publishing, has evolved over the years. While it was not always a standard practice, it has become a hallmark of scientific legitimacy. However, many researchers argue that the current state of peer review is broken, serving as little more than a cursory check by a few individuals.
“Peer review is not regarded very highly by the many that have to go through it. Today, many researchers will share that peer review is simply broken. It does not mean much more than 2-4 other people looked over the work and didn’t lament any problems the editor deemed too serious.
Is peer review important? Yes. Is it what it is made out to be in the current academic landscape? Perhaps not.”
In Conclusion
Brown makes it difficult to ignore the decades worth of abundant observations that mainstream climate change science is not just politicized, it is big business. And elite journals are in on it.
Jessica Weinkle’s “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game” serves as a timely reminder of the complexities and challenges of the academic publishing world. From the pressures faced by researchers to the commercialization of the publishing industry, the piece offers a comprehensive overview of the current landscape. As the academic community grapples with these issues, it is crucial to prioritize transparency, integrity, and the genuine pursuit of knowledge above all else.
The complete essay is definitely worth a read.
“and notes how Patrick Brown, a researcher at The Breakthrough
Institute, unveils the inner workings of climate change science”
This story vaporised in no time. Firstly Brown tells us that his co-authors weren’t on board with his story. They thought they were presenting research in good faith. It all comes back to Brown’s own thinking processes.
But then the Nature reviews are public. And, it turns out, several reviewers urged him to include the very things he says he forced himself to leave out to avoid Nature rejection:
“The second aspect that is a concern is the use of wildfire growth as the key variable. As the authors acknowledge there are numerous factors that play a confounding role in wildfire growth that are not directly accounted for in this study (L37-51). Vegetation type (fuel), ignitions ( lightning and people), fire management activities ( direct and indirect suppression, prescribed fire, policies such as fire bans and forest closures) and fire load.”
Great to see that Nick now realises that wildfires are mainly to do with fuel/fuel load, ignitions, bush management and wind.
Maybe he is capable of learning something that goes against his AGW mantra ??
That was the Nature reviewer writing.
You quoted it, so I assume you agree..
Poor Nick.. you have to get out of this foot in mouth habit of yours
.
quoting and retweeting is NOT a sign of agreement.
even writing the words “i agree” are not a certain sign of agreement.
you probably take your wife at face value when she says “Im fine”
I’m surprised you were even able to get two brain cells to cooperate long enough to capitalize your name properly.
Surely the issue is that despite identifying a serious and glaring omission the reviewer(s) didn’t reject and ask for a resubmission and the journal published it as it stood.
One has to ask oneself why?
The answer because without it the study was on message and with it possibly not so much?
This is really contorted reasoning. First it was that Nature wouldn’t let him say something. Then it was that Nature itself suggested that he should have said it, but stopped short of mandating it. Meanwhile Brown is vigorously protesting (to the referees) that he shouldn’t say what he later said they wouldn’t let him say.
In fact there was a degree of compromise. But the whole story that WUWT has been pushing is fake.
wind?
wind causes fires to spread, not start.
Unless the wind breaks a power line loose.
And seriously Nick.. still PRETENDING that passing “climate peer-review” is not mostly about the message.
You really haven’t been paying any attention to anything, have you.
Some people really don’t want the inner workings of the climate cabal, that they have been part of, exposed to the wider audience, do they !
Nick, sounds like you won’t be happy until thousands of “climate refugees” arrive at Moyhu and expect the village to house them all.
What a joyous feeling of vindication you’ll have 😁
Nick, you used to contribute to scientific discussions.
Of COURSE his co-authors weren’t on board, and of COURSE they said so. Saying anything else, or even remaining silent, would be tantamount to career suicide. We have plenty of evidence from ClimateGate, from the Remote Sensing debacle, from the recent Italian authors who had their paper yanked due to pressue from Michael Mann, from the ridiculous 97% studies and many others that the game is rigged, only the approved narrative gets published.
What happened to you? I used to disagree with you on matters of science and often you were right. Now you just show up in thread after thread dragging it off course or poo pooing it with absurd arguments that a child can see through. You’ve become the very definition of “troll” and I think that’s rather sad for you.
It’s not off course. The article is framed by the thoughts of Patrick Brown, who isn’t an insider, and editor or whatever. He’s just anothor author hopeful who is very keen to get his paper into Nature, and is in a funk as to what he should avoid saying. That’s all we have, and that weak story is buzzing about all the usual circles. The refutation, of course, isn’t mentioned, unless I do.
But the reviews toss all that out. The reviewesr themselves canvass the things Brown thought the journal wouldn’t let him say.
And, of course, his paper was accepted. Most submissions to Nature are not.
So Nick, you’re arguing that the reviewers said he should include things that he did not, but that Nature published it anyway..
So where does that leave us? Nature over ruled the reviewers!
You’ve hoisted yourself on your own petard. If the opinion of the reviewers meant a tinker’s d*mn, the paper would not have been published as is. But the opinion of the reviewers didn’t matter, what mattered was that it fit Nature’s view of the world, and that evidence was produced by none other than… you, Mr. Stokes.
Well, that is turning on a dime. First, Nature was the villain because Brown had spooked himself into not saying something; now Nature is the villain for not forcing him to say it. In fact, I don’t think that referee ever recommended publication, but Nature accepted it anyway. That can happen, and does not mean Brown was persecuted.
But it is interested to see how Brown responded when asked to include what he said he had been forbidden to say:
” We chose to focus on wildfire growth for the practical reason that it is relevant to consequences: large growth rates are associated with challenges in fighting fires, and thus these large growth days pose the biggest threat to life and property (articulated on lines 68-71 in the revised manuscript). Also, the most meaningful wildfire characteristics that we could substitute for growth would suffer from the same confounding factors.”
It’s all upside down.
“It’s all upside down.”
It has to be to pass “climate science” pee-review. !
Well, that is turning on a dime. First, Nature was the villain because Brown had spooked himself into not saying something; now Nature is the villain for not forcing him to say it.
That is not what I said Nick, and no rationale reading of this thread could possibly come to that conclusion.
The paper was not “published as-is,” and in fact the authors made a number of revisions based on the comments of the single reviewer who did not recommend publication. The authors also vociferously and competently defended their decision to limit the scope of their study to the effects of temperature on wildfire. Brown can say, “I privately thought we should have included other factors,” but that is not what he said in response to the reviewer, it is not anything he ever said to any of his co-authors, and there is no evidence whatsoever that if Brown had decided instead to include substantive discussion of other factors in response to the reviewer’s comments that Nature instead of writing an impassioned defense of his decision not to that the manuscript wouldn’t have been accepted for publication.
The desperate lengths that are being gone to to cling to this story as a signal of misconduct in scientific research is striking.
No edit button. Above should read “there is no evidence whatsoever that if Brown had decided instead to include substantive discussion of other factors in response to the reviewer’s comments, instead of writing an impassioned defense of his decision not to, that the manuscript wouldn’t still have been accepted for publication.”
Alan, I’ve dug deep into many other stories and found a pattern. Papers that went against the narrative were pulled. Hansen said he would keep papers out even it if meant changing the definition of peer review. Remote Sensing forced the editor to pull a paper and resign even though he found nothing wrong with the paper, two Italian researchers just had their paper pulled because of pressure from Michael Mann even though the papers conformed to IPCC reporting. The evidence that hat Brown says is true is all around you. You can twist and turn and find fault with this specific story, but it is part of a larger narrative that is obvious to anyone bothering to pay attention.
That doesn’t speak to a pattern so much as a confirmation bias. It’s possible the papers were pulled because they were bad papers. The editor of Remote Sensing resigned of his own volition because he took personal responsibility for the publication of a paper that should not have passed peer review. In an editorial he published before resigning he said:
That is hardly, “finding nothing wrong with the paper.” You might disagree with him that it was a bad paper, but he thought it was a bad paper that should not have been published.
Alan, I invesitgated that one along with several other regulars of WUWT and our conclusion was that the editors research funding (his real job) was threatened by “a researcher in the US” which I concluded at the time was most likely Kevin Trenberth or someone in his immediate circle. Editor said what he said because it was plain that if he did not, his career as a researcher was over.
Your reply sounds plausible to anyone withou the detailed background on that incident, but your explanation is obvious perception management by someone with an agenda.
I notice you didn’t rebutt ANY of the other incidents I brought up. Nice try, total fail. Brown’s assertions stand and your and Nick’s protestations serve to support them despite your best efforts to the contrary.
Well, ok… share the evidence leading to that conclusion. What I have available to me is the Spencer and Braswell paper, which is not good and should not have been published, and Wagner stating in his resignation note that the paper was not good and should not have been published. These seem to be complimentary facts pointing to the conclusion that Wagner did, in fact, resign because he felt that the paper was bad and should not have been published.
“ Hansen said he would keep papers out even it if meant changing the definition of peer review.”
David, you are just hopeless with facts. Hansen said no such thing. Phil Jones wrote something like that in an email, but he wasn’t talking about keeping papers out of a Journal (they had already been published). He was talking about keeping reference to them out of an IPCC section that he was responsible for. That section did in the end refer to them.
And as AlanJ says, the editor resigned from that IDMB journal (always a good move) because he had been hoodwinked into accepting a paper that he later found very faulty.
OK, Phil Jones, you are correct. It matters not that the papers eventually made it in. The point is that there is a concerted effort by the most powerful climate scientists in the world to keep contrary opinions out. The fact that they even TRIED ought to have been the end of their careers. But it wasn’t. They continue to do exactly what they said, work to keep contrary papers out.
He wasn’t hoodwinked into accepting a bad paper. He was threatened into pulling it and resigning.
Michael Mann succesfully got the Italian paper pulled even though it was in agreement with the IPCC.
Accepted because it didn’t go against the AGW meme. !
“several reviewers urged him to include the very things he says he forced himself to leave out to avoid Nature rejection”
The real question is- would Nature have rejected the paper if he included what he left out? Maybe somebody should ask Nature.
it vaporized because there is no story
It’s hard to have any respect for “climate scientists” who consume hundreds of billions of dollars from Democrat government activists that “manufacture” unproven and unreliable climate models that comply with the political objectives of fabricating projections that support the politics of climate alarmism and to hell with the real data that shows the models are crap.
Hey! It’s Mr Run-on Sentence!
“The 1990s witnessed a significant clash between positivists, who believed in an objective truth attainable through the scientific method, and relativists, who argued that people interpret science through their values, culture, and worldview.”
THat battle goes back to Greece, 2000BC.
maybe he meant the 1990s BC. 🙂
Hardly. That battle goes back to Greece no earlier than 650 BCE, Babylon slightly earlier or Egypt around 1600 BCE. The Greek scholars appear to have drawn heavily from the earlier Babylonian and Persian scholars on this.
Psychological warfare is the easiest to manage because there are only a small number of gatekeeper editors needed to control narratives.
From the article: “Academic publishing, once a noble endeavor, has transformed into a lucrative business, with global revenues estimated to exceed $23 billion.”
I had no idea these publishers were making so much money! I think authors get charged somewhere around $2,500 to get published. These publishers must be putting out a lot of studies to be making $23 billion per year.
“Brown makes it difficult to ignore the decades worth of abundant observations that mainstream climate change science is not just politicized, it is big business. And elite journals are in on it.”
When it comes to human-caused climate change, these publishers are totally corrupt, and get paid very well for being so.
Early in the Trump admin the EPA talked of demanding all background data associated with regulations. There was a huge outcry against this demand from academia. One of the editors at Science came out on the side of the academics. I wrote to him. I said how can you take that position when you’ve been saying for years there is a Crisis of Reproducibility in academic publications? His answers weren’t very good
Positivists working from the lens of an objective truth obtainable stepwise through the scientific method. Relativists worked from the lens that people make meaning of things including science through their values, culture, worldview, and relationships.”
And of course we make sense of scientific publishing with relativistic accounts of corruption
and politics.
this whole focus on Brown is evidence that the relativists are right. we DO make MEANING through our culture and relationships . look at how you are making meaning of the whole brown
affair.
As I watch people trying to make Sense of Brown I dont see a single reader who practices skeptical hermenuetics.
read Brown through the lens of your “climate science is corrupt” memes.
ya’ll trapped in the contrarian matrix.
https://contrarianmatrix.wordpress.com/
no original thoughts!. no unfiltered unvarished observation
of the facts. no nulls, just confirmation bias.
This whole Patrick Brown Affair should’t even be news.
Everyone who writes, knows that you take your audience into account. that you tailor your narrative to convince or persuade your audience. You always have to leave facts out.or every writing would begin with genesis.
Right. So, I have decided to leave out all of the ‘facts’ in your post except for the letters ‘c’, ‘r’, ‘a’ and ‘p’. You will, of course, agree to that given your opinion that it is perfectly fine, thinking of the audience, to leave out whatever ‘facts’ don’t fit what you want to say.
“This whole Patrick Brown Affair should’t even be news”
But it is news. And not just here at WUWT.
A heartwarming story about publishing.
I just watched a fascinating video by Nick Zentner, a geology lecturer at Central Washington U. He presented work by Robert S Hildebrand who published geomagnetic data that negates the current hypothesis about formation of the Rocky mountains in the 1970’s. His findings were ignored or denigrated for more than 20 years before being confirmed and enlarged upon by others. Now there are more competing theories, all still not discussed in geology textbooks.
“Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game”
Flawed argument. Without players, there would be no game.
So would you like a game of ‘Bandy-wickets’? Or maybe ‘Are you there Moriarty’? Both games are no longer played, have no players but are still recognised as games. Your flawed argument opinion is flawed…