The Patriot Post® · Climate Narrative Trumps Science

In a recently published article in The Free Press, climate scientist Patrick Brown exposes a dirty but not so surprising reality regarding two of the world’s top scientific journals, Nature and Science. In some ways, his title says it all: “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published.”

Brown claims that in order to get published, researchers must conclude “that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes … or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines.” Instead, he notes, researches should favor “policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

In other words, the only “science” permitted in these leading scientific journals, at least when it comes to climate science, is that which upholds and supports the Left’s political narrative on climate change. The dogma: Mankind is primarily responsible for causing it and the only “solution” is to severely limit or entirely end our use of fossil fuels.

Brown explains that he knows these leading journals are more interested in pushing the climate change narrative rather than genuinely sound and unfettered scientific research because he himself bowed to the climate change gatekeepers at Nature in order to publish his paper, “Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California.”

He writes, “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.” Climate science has become more religious cult than dispassionate scientific research.

Why has this happened? How have austere scientific journals like Nature and Science become so corrupted as to push politics over and against science? According to Brown, it boils down to the twin pursuits of fortune and fame.

Over the decades, the number of researchers has “skyrocketed,” with the U.S. now producing nearly six times more PhDs annually than in the early 1960s. This massive increase in the number of researchers raises the competition for getting published in leading science journals. While this in and of itself should not be a problem, as competition is the crucible for innovation and development, the means for getting coveted name recognition has narrowed considerably.

That narrowing has led researchers to recognize that the editors of these prestigious journals are not dispassionate upholders of science but instead biased politicos. By placating these biases, researchers know they have a better chance of getting published.

Brown is careful to note that these scientists are not usually presenting faux research. Rather, they are simply focusing their research on subject matter that supports the prevailing narrative, while avoiding any other factors that would serve to undermine it.

“In my paper,” he admits, “we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” Brown further charges, “This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers.”

In a secular society where the notion of an omniscient God is eschewed and religion is merely a personal fantasy and regulated out of the public square, the result is a societal dearth of moral reason and authority. Not only is the question of “Why be good?” raised, but even more fundamental is the question, “What is good?”

Since the secular humanist can’t appeal to God for the answer to both of these massively significant questions, he appeals to the only authority he is willing to recognize — science. The obvious problem with this appeal is that science in and of itself contains no moral prerogative or principle. In studying a rock, one may learn much regarding its physical characteristics, composition, and where it came from, but one will not learn that it should not be used to murder another human being.

The trouble is, that is exactly what the modern secularist is attempting to do — use science to create and conform society to a new “scientific” morality, something it simply cannot do. But since science is still prized by Western culture as a reliable means for establishing truth claims, appealing to science has been twisted into appealing to unassailable moral assertions. Doing this has ironically had the opposite effect, as trust in scientific claims has decreased.

In short, the gatekeepers of these scientific journals have become so blinded by their own biases that it has resulted in a politicization of scientific research. Now we can no longer trust The Science™.