.
Science From the Fringe

In the sixth episode of In Defense of Climate Change, Bryce Nickels and climate policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr. discuss Roger’s recent essay examining the legacy of the influential 2004 Science paper introducing the concept of “stabilization wedges” (https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/…. Roger’s essay was prompted by a recent ProPublica investigation revealing that this paper was heavily shaped by BP executives whose contributions were not acknowledged in the paper.

Roger explains how the stabilization wedges paper became one of the most influential papers in the history of climate policy by promoting the idea that existing technologies were sufficient to address climate change. The paper became a powerful advocacy tool, shaping philanthropic investments, climate policy, and public discourse while contributing to efforts to marginalize scientists who argued that significant technological innovation would still be required.

The conversation then turns to broader questions about the relationship between science, politics, and advocacy. Bryce and Roger discuss the distinction between conducting science and using scientific publications to market predetermined policy agendas, arguing that the latter can undermine both scientific integrity and public trust.

Roger and Bryce also discuss the striking parallels between the stabilization wedges paper and the 2020 Nature Medicine paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” They discuss how both papers were used to influence public debate, the importance of transparency in scientific authorship, and the responsibility of scientific journals to investigate allegations of ghostwriting and misconduct in order to preserve confidence in the scientific record.

(recorded July 24, 2026)

About the Series
In Defense of Climate Change features conversations between climate policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr. and Rutgers professor and Science From the Fringe host Bryce Nickels. The series examines one of the most politically polarized areas of modern science—what the evidence actually shows about climate change, and how those findings are interpreted, amplified, and sometimes distorted once they enter politics and the media. By focusing on data, historical context, and intellectual honesty, the conversations aim to cut through extreme narratives and separate the underlying science from the stories that often dominate public debate.

About Roger Pielke Jr.
Roger Pielke Jr. is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he served on the faculty from 2001 to 2024 and founded the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. His work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, and politics, particularly in climate, energy, innovation, and sports governance. In 2024 he was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. He writes the widely read Substack The Honest Broker, which has more than 40,000 subscribers worldwide, and is the author of several books on science policy, including The Honest Broker and The Climate Fix.

---

AI generated and formatted transcript

In Defense of Climate Change — Bryce Nickels with Roger Pielke, Jr.

On the 2004 Stabilization Wedges paper, the ProPublica investigation, and parallels with Proximal Origin

---

Chapter 1: Introduction

BRYCE NICKELS: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of In Defense of Climate Change. I’m Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University, and I’m joined once again by Roger Pielke, Jr., who’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, and author of the popular science policy Substack, The Honest Broker. His work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, and politics, particularly in the areas of climate, energy, innovation, and sports governance. Roger, how are you doing today?

ROGER PIELKE, JR.: I’m doing well. It’s a nice, bright, sunny day in Boulder, Colorado.

BRYCE: That’s wonderful. We also have nice weather here in New Jersey. I don’t want to compete with Boulder, but I’m just saying.

But today we’re going to talk about an essay that you published back in June, which was titled, “Another Pillar of Climate Advocacy Collapses: The 2004 Stabilization Wedges paper wrongly told the world that we had all the technology we needed to solve climate change. We just learned it was ghost written by BP.”

Chapter 2: The stabilization wedges concept

BRYCE: Your essay was prompted by a recent ProPublica investigation into this paper that we’re going to discuss today, and I’ll get to that in a second. So can you begin by first explaining what the stabilization wedges paper is?

ROGER: Yeah. This goes back more than 20 years, so for people who came to the climate issue since then, this is deep history. But it’s very hard to overstate how influential this particular paper was, maybe for a decade or more — not so much in science, but in public communication and policy related to climate.

So the stabilization wedges paper had this notion that to stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide — this is before we talked about net zero emissions, and the idea was we were going to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — we needed to have emissions growth stop by 2054. And if you draw a picture in your mind of emissions going up, and then a flat line with them stopping, that’s a triangle. The authors cut that triangle into 15 wedges, each representing something like a gigaton of carbon dioxide emitted a year. And they said, if we could eliminate these 15 wedges worth of carbon dioxide, we would stabilize concentrations.

Their argument — and this is what made the paper so influential — was, we have all the technologies we need to accomplish these 15 wedges of reduction. Their argument was we have 18 to 20 wedges out there, so of course we have 15. And that argument was used to push back against people who said, well, we need more technological innovation in energy production, energy consumption. And so very quickly it was a highly influential, very politicized paper in the discussion.

Chapter 3: The ProPublica investigation and BP’s role

BRYCE: What prompted your essay was this ProPublica piece, which was titled “Beyond Denial: How Oil Executives Shaped a Landmark Climate Study.” Can you explain or summarize the key details in that ProPublica piece?

ROGER: Yeah, so the ProPublica piece revealed emails and inner conversations between the authors — two academics at Princeton — who had worked with BP, formerly British Petroleum, to craft the paper. And it turns out BP funded some of the work that went into it. But what wasn’t known was how very tightly connected the authors, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow at Princeton, had been to the upper leadership at BP at the time. And there are things in the ProPublica reporting, such as a BP executive saying, I shouldn’t be on the paper as an author. There is a pretty damning comment — I think it was from Socolow — who said, BP is paying the bills, they can do whatever they want with this paper. And that included the concept of wedges, which actually came from BP.

And so for ProPublica reporting this in 2026, they thought this is a scandal, because in the wedges paper there was a lot of room for fossil fuels out into the future. At the time, the paper was not framed as protecting fossil fuels. And so ProPublica is a little bit putting today’s standards on a historical event by saying, well, if fossil fuels were involved in funding, then it must have been a bad paper. At the time, it was held up by the strongest climate advocates as the way forward. So it really wasn’t at the time viewed as a fossil fuel rescue mission. That only came with the ProPublica reporting.

For me — and we can get into this — the issues aren’t so much the funding, which I think we knew about, but the ghost writing elements of the paper, and the fact that the paper really was designed to fulfill what I called stage-managed science. It wasn’t a fully scientific endeavor. It was meant to shape the political discourse, which it did overwhelmingly.

Chapter 4: The political origins of the Wedges paper

BRYCE: And you have a quotation in your article that one of the authors, in 2008 — so four years after this paper was published — said that the purpose of the paper was narrow and simple: “We wanted to stop the Bush administration from what we saw as a strategy to stall action on global warming by claiming that we lacked the technology to tackle it. I wanted that to stop, and the paper for me was surprisingly effective at doing that.” So do you want to comment on that?

ROGER: Yeah. So in the late ’90s, early 2000s, Marty Hoffert, Ken Caldeira, and colleagues published a series of really fantastic papers on the magnitude of the energy challenge involved with decarbonizing our economy. And basically what they said is, in round numbers, we need something like a nuclear power plant worth of carbon-free energy deployed every day out until 2050. They didn’t use that quantification — that’s my quantification, based on their numbers.

And when the George W. Bush administration came in, they seized on that. I think it’s safe to say they weren’t super excited about climate policy, so they said, well, we can’t have deep emissions reductions because we don’t have all the technologies we need yet, because the challenge is so big. And so right away, the idea of innovation and technology became framed in this kind of partisan back and forth. Republicans wanted innovation, and then Democrats decided that we had all the technologies we needed.

And so this paper — as you quoted, even in 2008 one of the authors admitted that the idea was to stop the Bush administration from saying we needed innovation — it seeped out into the broader discussion of climate policy. Today it sounds bizarre, but if you were for technological innovation, you were a climate skeptic against climate policy. And if you were opposed to innovation, you were a good guy. So it was a weird framing from today’s perspective, but that’s kind of how things set out based on those papers.

Chapter 5: How the Wedges framework shaped climate advocacy

BRYCE: Right, so let’s get into that a bit, because you talk about how this framework — the idea of these wedges, and we have the existing technologies, we just have to sort of fit the pieces together properly or whatever — became a major intellectual driver for philanthropy and advocacy about climate policy. How did that happen? Who were the organizations involved, and then, I guess, how did that play out with respect to, as you discussed, the silencing of people who disagreed with the premise of this wedges paper?

ROGER: Yeah, and full credit to Matthew Nisbet, who’s a professor these days at Northeastern University. He did a report called Climate Shift — 2011 maybe, 2012 — that kind of explored the coalescing of philanthropists and billionaires in the climate movement.

In around 2007, 2008, they put together a document called Design to Win. It’s the big funders like MacArthur, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and others who are still active in climate. And the purpose of that effort was to say, well, we have a lot of money, but we all fund our own things, and we push and pull in different directions. We need a central organizing strategy for the climate movement and for philanthropy, which drives obviously a lot of advocacy and policy research.

And the wedges landed right in the center of that Design to Win strategy. The report acknowledged that technological innovation is a good thing, but it was secondary to the need to deploy existing technologies that we have for emissions reductions. And so a group — it’s still around — the Center for American Progress, which is a progressive think tank advocacy group in Washington, decided to be the champion of this wedges approach and the deployment approach, and really use their resources. Tom Steyer, for example, was a big funder of theirs, back when he was into climate — not so much nowadays, but running for governor of California.

And the idea was that anyone who openly talks about technological innovation — and people at the center of that included Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who founded the Breakthrough Institute in California. They had come to the attention of really the environmental movement, the climate movement, when they wrote an essay in 2004 called “The Death of Environmentalism,” saying that the old approaches are broken and we need to focus on building things, we need to focus on abundance, we need to focus on innovation. And they wrote a book called Break Through. They were a target. I was a target — we could talk more about that. I published a paper with Chris Green and Tom Wigley in 2008 that built on the Marty Hoffert work and kind of destroyed the wedges.

So the climate movement had organized and had an awful lot of money, and from the perspective of 2026, we can say they backed the wrong horse in the policy battle. The argument that we had all the technologies we needed was wrong then, it’s wrong today. And so arguably not just the wedges paper, but the advocacy infrastructure built on top of it, really set back climate policy for at least a decade, maybe longer.

Chapter 6: Innovation versus deployment and silencing dissent

BRYCE: I get the sense that people who were participating in pushing wedges as the way to go, they believed that we needed to do something to correct — whether or not that belief is sound or not, they actually had a mission in their mind to solve climate change or whatever. And they chose to say, all right, wedges, this wedges approach is the way to go, but everything else — and so that means that everything else is bad, and we’re going to attack everything else. Is that a fair assessment?

ROGER: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s right. There was, and there still is today, a legitimate policy debate to be had over how much money do we want to put into trying to push technologies forward, versus subsidies for technologies that exist to try to pull them into the marketplace. That’s perfectly fine and legitimate. But you’re absolutely right that that debate really wasn’t had on its merits back then. It was more a political battle over who has a voice to speak.

And my story is well known. Going back through the wedges experience, I didn’t really appreciate at the time how much our 2008 paper was threatening to the wedges folks, because we showed very clearly that we didn’t have all the technology that we needed. And so instead of taking on our paper — which has been well cited and never really challenged — they decided to go after me.

And there are still vestiges of this. You can find online, Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute — for some climate advocates, he’s a bad guy. And why? Well, I don’t know, he always has been a bad guy. And all that just goes back to the Hatfields versus McCoys sort of thing 20 years ago.

Chapter 7: Was the science behind the Wedges paper sound?

BRYCE: Can we talk a little bit about the science of the wedges paper, just to make sure that we cover that?

ROGER: Yeah.

BRYCE: At the time, was the scientific presentation of this in the paper sound at the time, or was it actually unsound?

ROGER: Yeah, so there are elements that were very sound and elements that were highly questionable — probably unsound would be fair. Each wedge was identified or associated with some set of policy actions. So one wedge worth of emissions reductions might come from agriculture, for example — changing how we plant or till or manage the land. Another might have been associated with solar energy, so solar energy replaces coal or nuclear on the grid.

One that ProPublica singled out, and I think is probably very fair, was carbon capture and storage. Carbon capture and storage is the idea that we will pull carbon dioxide from the effluent, the waste from fossil fuel plants, natural gas or coal. Think of the smokestack, and you put a vacuum cleaner on the top and you suck the carbon dioxide out and you put it somewhere. That technology did not exist at scale. It does not exist at scale today. And so the idea that it was in the wedges was pretty unsound. It didn’t represent a wedge.

So really the wedges paper was less about science and presenting new information than packaging existing information in a very marketable package that happened to be in Science, which gives it a blessing. Board games were made out of it — you and your kids can sit around the table and decarbonize the planet. It was part of all sorts of training programs for environmental activists. So it was less a science paper and more a paper in Science that was really useful for advocacy and marketing.

Chapter 8: Science versus marketing

BRYCE: Ah, okay. That’s a really critical thing to say. And this is something that I find coming up again and again, and something that I believe is the scourge of science. Even in just conversations with my colleagues about research and how to get people interested in research, I keep pushing back. I used to sort of say, oh, we have to figure out a way of selling this. Selling science is wrong. It’s wrong, it’s wrong. That’s not what we do.

We do not sell science. We provide results. That’s what we should be doing. But there’s a push by scientists to sell things. And here’s an example. What you just said is that this in fact was a paper that was created as a marketing tool, as a PR tool, in order to sell an agenda. And in fact — and you can correct me if I’m wrong about this — the agenda being one that would allow BP, who was funding the study, to continue making money, while also, you know, that there was a place for the products that BP was selling in a world where we were caring about climate change and trying to deal with the effects of climate, right? Is that a fair assessment?

Chapter 9: BP’s motivations and the paper’s dual purpose

ROGER: So what we know — I’ll just add one nuance to that. We know there was a confluence of interests. So BP’s motivation, we now know thanks to ProPublica, was to ensure that there was a world where there was a healthy demand for fossil fuels to mid-century and beyond. That was why they were supporting this effort.

We also know, from the authors’ public comments and those revealed by ProPublica, their motivation was to push back against the Bush administration. And so the paper served two functions at once: it was useful in trying to silence the Republicans who were saying we need more technological innovation. And for BP, who may or may not have cared about that debate, they just wanted to make sure that the fossil fuels were still flowing out to mid-century. And so the paper served both of those purposes.

Chapter 10: Funding disclosures versus ghostwriting

BRYCE: Can you just comment real quick on what the actual financial ties between the authors of the paper and BP was?

ROGER: Yeah, I’m not too into those details. I know BP had significant funding of the Princeton center where Pacala and Socolow worked. In the paper, there’s acknowledgement of funding to BP. So that’s a little bit less, I think, new or interesting than the fact that we had these correspondences between the authors and the BP executives while they were writing the paper, showing the BP executives actually — in any definition of what co-authorship is — participating as co-authors in a paper that they eventually didn’t have their name on.

BRYCE: Right. Yeah. And that’s what I wanted to just make sure was clarified here, because at the time it was known — the funding link to BP was known and disclosed, and kudos to the authors for doing that. I mean, that’s the way things should be. Every financial tie, whoever’s funding something, that should be disclosed.

The issue that was revealed in the ProPublica article — as we’ll talk about a little bit more and tie it into some of the more recent developments in another issue that we’ve discussed, with relation to COVID origins — is the idea that there was unacknowledged input from executives at BP as to what the content of the paper would be.

Chapter 11: BP’s public image and historical context

ROGER: Yeah, and there’s an important part of the context also that will probably be lost to history for many people. This was when BP was the good guys. BP had changed its logo so that it was green, and I think John Browne was the CEO who came in around that time, maybe 2005-ish. He said, you know, BP stands for Beyond Petroleum, not British Petroleum — Beyond Petroleum.

So the idea that BP was funding this paper at the time — I don’t recall anyone raising any issue about that at the time. These were the good guys. They’re the energy folks who are transitioning the energy system. So the perception at the time, unlike in the ProPublica article, the perception was BP was a good guy.

Chapter 12: Organized attacks on critics of the Wedges framework

BRYCE: And so the idea here is that you have a paper funded by BP that’s written and then used in presentations by the executives, there’s a board game made, now we have philanthropic organizations taking it upon themselves to say this is the way forward — and other people that are saying, no, we really need to also be innovating to develop new technologies. Not only are those — well, I guess the thing is, like I said, it’s not just a disagreement, but there’s active attacks and silencing of those opposing voices. Can you just maybe briefly mention some of the stuff that happened to you?

ROGER: Yeah, I mean, so the Center for American Progress had a unit inside of it called Climate Progress. And Climate Progress — this was the era of blogs, so we call them Substacks or similar today, but this was a big era of climate blogging. They had a blogger named Joe Romm, who really was the center of discussion on climate policy. And he used some kind of voice-to-text software and pushed out 10,000 words a day. And he also was very pugilistic and very aggressive and very political.

I counted it up at some point, that they had written something like 160 blog post articles about me over this period, most of them in 2008, 2009, about our paper — it was called “Dangerous Assumptions.” But they had seven authors, including Matt Yglesias when he was an intern, and a few people that have gone on to climate advocacy careers that people would recognize.

And I know this because in the Hillary Clinton WikiLeaks that were released in 2016, there’s a message from one of the Center for American Progress staffers to Tom Steyer, the billionaire, thanking him for his funding that allowed them to deplatform me. So the fact that there was an organized campaign against me at the time — I was young and naive. I thought, oh, my ideas must be so important that they’re writing 160 articles about me. No, it was an effort to try to clear the playing field. But the stories I can tell about those days are amazing. Many.

Chapter 13: “Climate McCarthyism”

BRYCE: Well, you also used the phrase “climate McCarthyism” in your essay, right, to describe what the Center for American Progress, and in particular this guy Joe Romm, was doing.

ROGER: Yeah, that came from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. I think they wrote four pieces about Romm and how he poisons the whole discussion around climate. So if anybody wants to Google “climate McCarthyism,” they’ll find that series of articles, which have stood the test of time pretty well, I think.

Chapter 14: Parallels with Proximal Origin

BRYCE: All right. So now I want to turn to something that’s near and dear to my heart, which is the controversy around COVID origins. So let me begin by reading a quote in your essay. You say:

“Scientific claims designed to serve pre-determined political conclusions carry risks, even when — or maybe especially when — the underlying cause is broadly viewed to be legitimate or virtuous. The Wedges paper’s political purpose did not make climate change less real or less serious, but it did produce a paper whose analytical honesty suffered for its political ambitions. And that paper then became a tool for suppressing legitimate inquiry that over the course of time proved correct.”

Can you comment on what you see, if you see parallels, between what happened with this Wedges paper and what happened in the case of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in March of 2020 to suppress debate around the origin of COVID-19?

ROGER: Yeah. And for listeners, Bryce and I are having this conversation just in the days after a new tranche of Slack messages were released by Senator Paul among the authors of that Proximal Origin paper.

I think the parallels are incredibly close. Here we have a paper that was produced — and we know it was produced to manage a public discussion, because we have not only the Slack messages from this week, but email messages from investigative journalists, Freedom of Information Act releases, the work of a couple congressional committees — that show that the authors did not really believe what they wrote when they wrote the paper, but they did so in order to manage the discussion, the debate over the origins of COVID.

What is remarkable, and I think Proximal Origin is even more troubling than the Wedges paper, is because there’s no evidence that the Wedges guys didn’t believe what they were writing. They were being very instrumental in how they were crafting it, and it was really science as marketing. But one interpretation of Proximal Origin is it is “science” — I put it in scare quotes — science as marketing. It was to use an influential platform, one of the top journals in the world, to craft a message that would be useful in politics to push back against other messages.

Just like the Wedges paper, Proximal Origin has been extremely successful in derailing a discussion about the origins of COVID that would be fair and have a wide range of views. I think that’s turning now that these messages are out. I had a colleague text or email me yesterday after he read my piece on the Slack messages, and he said he’s finally convinced that Proximal Origin should be retracted. I was convinced early on, but for those who have held out the hope that maybe this was real science and there was some sincere belief there, it’s very hard to keep that going now.

Chapter 15: Ghostwriting and undisclosed contributors

BRYCE: The other component with that, with Proximal Origin, is the aspect of ghost writing.

ROGER: The equivalent to BP, I guess, might have been the US government officials, head of the Wellcome Trust, who participated in helping these scientists come around to the idea that a paper should be written and what it should have in it. I’ve written about this and I prepared congressional testimony on this.

If you take a look at the messages, it seems very clear to me that at least one of those people, head of the Wellcome Trust, should have been listed as a co-author for the role played — just like the BP executives should have been listed as co-authors in the Wedges paper.

But what was interesting is that the US government officials who helped to promote and organize the scientists to write the paper later stood before the press and acted like this paper came out of the ether and coincidentally supported the views that they had already held. It was a full-circle marketing exercise where the same people that motivated the paper were also then the beneficiaries of its arguments for their political view — just very much like the Wedges paper.

Chapter 16: Scientific fraud versus undisclosed authorship

BRYCE: Although, I guess, as you point out, with the Wedges paper the authors believed what they wrote, unlike Proximal Origin, in which it’s very clear that the authors had serious questions. And in fact, in the new release of Slack messages there’s yet another — I mean, there’s a specific mention by Kristian Andersen that one of the statements they made in the paper was false, about whether or not research of this kind was going on over the world or just in China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So in that case, there’s scientific fraud.

In my opinion, Proximal Origin is simply scientific fraud, whereas I don’t think you’re saying that the Wedges paper is fraud. You’re saying that it’s more, there were contributors to it that should have been acknowledged, because it would have changed the perception of the paper. Is that maybe a fair thing to say about wedges?

ROGER: Yeah, I mean, that is fair, because that’s what the authors said in the ProPublica emails — that if the BP role was fully acknowledged, the paper would have potentially less impact.

BRYCE: And that is exactly what we saw in the private correspondence with the contributors of Proximal Origin. Recently we saw Francis Collins acknowledge that he contributed to it and it was appropriate that his name not be on it. And that is, as you mentioned, Jeremy Farrar, who was the head of the funding agency that’s listed in Proximal Origin — his name was not acknowledged in the paper. And that is a clear violation of Nature Medicine‘s own policies with regard to who should be acknowledged in a paper.

And I guess just to put a final point on that: both you and I have publicly stated that we believe Proximal Origin should be retracted. And in fact, I think — did you sign both, or no, you signed one of the letters that was sent to Nature Medicine to call for its retraction. But as of now, the chief editor of Nature Medicine has essentially been silent on this, which I think is frankly just disgraceful.

With that in mind, in your essay you state that you think Science should investigate the paper based on the allegations in ProPublica, and potentially issue some sort of comment, or even potentially retract it. Do you want to say something about that?

Chapter 17: Scientific journals and accountability

ROGER: Yeah. So these big journals have public and policy impact that is way outside their role in advancing science. I think let’s just put that on the table. And so they have, I think, a very high obligation to ensure that their standards — which are the standards and norms of our community — are followed.

And so if Nature Medicine and Nature and Science have standards of what it means to be a co-author of a paper, then those standards are either meaningful or they’re not. And if they’re meaningful, then when we have evidence that shows up that shows that those standards were violated, number one, they owe us all an obligation to at least investigate and find out: is this reporting true? Are these Slack messages correct, and the emails?

And if so, I think in the case of the Wedges paper there’s really two paths forward. One is to retroactively revise the authorship and say, we have this evidence that one or two of these BP executives fulfilled the role of an author, and so we’re issuing a correction to the paper. And if that’s not acceptable to the authors or the ghost authors, then the other option is to retract it, because it violated the authorship rules.

It would be only symbolic at this point, because really, nobody cares about wedges anymore. Most people haven’t heard of them, and it’s not part of the climate discussion. But scientific integrity matters, even if it’s 20 years later. So I feel the same thing about Nature Medicine — that Nature as an institution should open an investigation and report back to us whether they believe the authorship guidelines were violated. And if not, why not? Because it seems pretty straightforward based on the information that is now out in the public.

BRYCE: To be frank though, Roger, they clearly don’t have integrity. I mean, their actions — they’ve had plenty of time. And I’m talking specifically about the case of Proximal Origin. This is Nature Medicine‘s editor, and also the head of Nature, I guess it’s João Monteiro at Nature Medicine and I guess it’s Magdalena Skipper, who in fact was invited to testify in front of the House and didn’t show up. These are people whose actions demonstrate they have no integrity, they have no principles, they do not adhere to what they say with regard to the ethical standards of their journal. That’s just factual. That’s based on the evidence that we have today.

Chapter 18: The broader crisis in scientific publishing

ROGER: Well, let me just jump in and say — I think in one of our discussions, we discussed a fake hurricane data set that I exposed, that was based on research I had done, that some intern had added a bunch of stuff to and then put online. And it’s found its way into a couple peer-reviewed papers, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the US National Climate Assessment. And I pointed this out to multiple journal editors. PNAS was one of them, the Journal of the American Meteorological Society. And they refused to retract what is obviously research with a fake data set.

So I think Proximal Origin is a big deal, but I think that the rot that is in scientific publishing goes pretty deep. Nobody cares about this little Excel file online. It’s not the impact of Proximal Origin. But if you can’t fix that one, how in the world are they going to have the integrity to fix a bigger one?

Chapter 19: Should the scientific journal system be replaced?

BRYCE: And that’s why I’ve stated time and time again, I think the scientific journal system should be abolished. We don’t need it. It should go away. And I’ve been pleading with the NIH to release a policy that caps journal publication fees at zero dollars, because that would go a long way towards defunding and dismantling the journal system. So I’ll state once again: do that.

We don’t need the scientific journals. We have preprint servers. We can — or we’ll just figure out a better system — because the one that we have, there’s too many examples where fraud is allowed to persist, where people use the journals, as in this case, as tools to sell something and market something under the guise that it’s scientific. I just don’t see any value to them whatsoever.

But with respect to — I see no value to them, but they still exist. So we exist in the real world where they are a thing and other people do care about them. So my last question to you, perhaps about the wedges paper, is: would you want to get together a formal letter to Science that asks for them to launch an investigation that could lead to either issuing a correction or retracting the paper? That’s something that you would be interested in potentially pursuing sometime in mid-August, when I clear a lot of other things off my own plate?

Chapter 20: Calling for an investigation of the Wedges paper

ROGER: Yeah, I would be happy to. Just, you know, full disclosure: my batting average is something like .000 on these types of things.

BRYCE: Yes, mine too. Mine too. Well, no, I guess I did get one statement. They did issue — I forget the journal — EMI, Emerging Microbes and Infections, did write this little blurb, added it to, I think it was a Susan Weiss paper that was written to kind of protect Ralph Baric. They did add a paragraph in response to a letter that was sent by myself and others. So I don’t know, for what it’s worth, if you’d count that. But yes, our collective batting averages on getting real accountability for this type of behavior, I guess, is 0%. But hey, you don’t get to improve that batting average if you don’t try. You don’t step to the plate.

ROGER: I think also there’s merit in the process and being public about it and saying, here’s the issues that we see as members of this community. We’d like the institutions who have formal responsibility to follow up. And then they can either follow up or not follow up, but at least that’s on the record.

BRYCE: Correct. And yeah, and maybe they’ll surprise me, because as I said before, I have no confidence in them to do the right thing. They only do the right thing when it serves their own interest. And so perhaps maybe in this case it will serve their interest. Maybe they’ll do something on this, because maybe ProPublica’s article is something that they’d say, oh, we can take advantage of this to show — I don’t know. I mean, I won’t question them. Why question the motivations? Let’s do the right thing.

All right. Well, and finally—

Chapter 21: The dangers of politicizing science

ROGER: Let me just say one thing about that. I think the bigger lesson of both the Wedges paper and Proximal Origin has to do with the culture of our communities — the scientific culture, and the political culture within which the scientific culture has to swim and operate. Many people in our community have decided, very prominent people, that playing politics inside science for instrumental objectives is what we do in science.

I was just at the European Geosciences Union, EGU, meeting in Vienna, and a young person stood up at a panel and asked the scientists — this is almost a direct quote — “I’m just starting out my career. What kind of research can I do that will help lawyers to sue fossil fuel companies?” And it’s not, I want to understand ice sheets, I want to understand atmospheric dynamics. I want to do something instrumental, I want to construct research for an instrumental end.

And I think that makes it much more difficult for normal people to know what’s what. But I think more importantly, it means people often have a legitimate reason not to trust us, because they might think, oh, they’re just marketing. There’s a lot of fantastic science that’s out there, but if a small part of it is about marketing and suppressing other views, that contaminates everything — the good and the bad.

Chapter 22: Closing thoughts

BRYCE: Yeah, that’s a big problem. Absolutely. The idea that the reason that you’re doing science is for some preconceived agenda is wrong. I mean, that’s not science.

So, okay, thank you again, Roger, for joining me on another episode of In Defense of Climate Change. My name is Bryce Nickels, and until next time, take care, everybody.