Are Scientific Journals Biased?

Climate Change and the Politics of Publishing

An article published in The Free Press last week set off a firestorm of controversy in the climate change world. Patrick Brown, a scientist with the heterodox environmental thinktank The Breakthrough Institute, admitted that he oversimplified an analysis on wildfire risk in order to get it published at Nature. His more contentious argument is that getting through review at the world’s top scientific journal demands such oversimplification:

“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”

In his Nature paper, Brown focused primarily on the role of climate change in extreme wildfire risk. Given that wildfires are also driven by human activities, shorting electrical wires, poor forest management, etc., it seems clear that Brown’s paper does exactly the kind of climate-centric doomism that he is lamenting. His contention seems to be that his paper should have been rejected more strongly challenged in review. However, an unspoken publishing bias, in his view, leads to too little scrutiny of simplistic climate narratives and not enough platforming of more complex ones.

Reactions to Brown’s admission, unsurprisingly, map onto the already existing political terrain of climate science. Those who think that pitch for climate change is often overly catastrophic, like the folks at The Breakthrough Institute, backed Brown. Others charged Brown with giving fuel to right-wing climate denialists, and misrepresenting publishing on climate change.

Science policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr., found Brown’s claims to be “completely consistent with [his] professional experience.” And Roger should know, he has consistently pointed out how the use of the extreme (and unrealistic) RCP8.5 scenario dominates climate research, and he details on his Substack how simplistically cataclysmic climate stories get repeated in the media. There is evidence of corroborate Brown’s perception that, even in overwise staid science journals, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

Still, some skepticism is warranted. According to Nature’s editor, the narrowness of the analysis of wildfire risk was, in fact, noted by a reviewer. But Brown argues that the reviewer wasn’t suggesting he put more emphasis on non-climate factors but that looking at other variables would make it easier to see the influence of temperature on wildfire (i.e., a clearer climate signal). In any case, Brown implies in an interview at Heat Map that had he taken up the reviewer’s suggestion and complexified his paper, he wouldn’t have succeeded in publishing it. The storyline would no longer have satisfied the journal’s editors.

But others have pointed out that Nature has recently published climate change articles that do tell a more complicated story, including a piece on human drivers of wildfires. That article is a commentary, not a peer-reviewed article. But still, its shows that any publication bias, should it exist, isn’t 100 percent.

Then again, biases by definition are probabilistic. They merely create an unlevel playing field. A handful of counterexamples doesn’t prove that papers deemphasizing the climate signal in environmental problems don’t face a steeper uphill battle. The data that we need to judge Brown’s claims of bias don’t yet exist. In the absence of good evidence, people will decide whether Brown is a whistleblower or a charlatan based on their personal politics. Though it, no doubt, doesn’t help things that the Daily Mail and other newspapers have had a field day with the story.

The right-wing media’s glee at Brown seeming to confirm their worst suspicions about climate science, I think, explains the extremity of the response. Researchers and journalists ought to tolerate ambiguity and thorny disagreements. Ought to. Scientists on Twitter are dismissing Brown as having “a lack of scientific integrity.” A Climatewire journalist completely misrepresents the situation to claim that Brown “manipulated climate data.” A commentator at the London School of Economics felt so confident about their reading of the situation to label Brown’s arguments “false claims.”

Political boundary work in action

What these scientists and journalists are doing is circling their wagons to defend the reputation of scientific publishing. To me, this seems like a kind of “noble lie,” the idea that it is okay to stretch the truth so long as one’s intentions are good, because the public can’t be trusted with the reality of the situation. In this case, protecting the image of climate change research as thoroughly objective and unbiased is deemed essential for saving the planet, otherwise skeptics will be able to delay the necessary political changes. Therefore, claims of publication bias must be discredited. Patrick Brown must be portrayed as outside the boundaries of respectable science in order to protect the whole enterprise.

That’s not to say that Patrick Brown hasn’t made any mistakes. The whole situation seems like a set up. Did Brown publish a paper that he knew to be misleading on wildfire risk to try to show the bias in climate change publishing? If so, he could have been far more systematic, submitting a variety of pitches and manuscripts, in order to better demonstrate the biases that he thinks pervades high-level science publishing. But Brown insists that it wasn’t a “sting.” Rather, he felt he should be able to criticize his own work. While I don’t think he deserves the ire that he’s receiving, he could have done far better work.

My own view is that Brown’s claims seem pretty plausible, even if he may have oversold what the publication of his wildfire paper actually shows. Most of the scientists that I’ve talked to have stories to tell about bias and politics in the publication process. It would actually be highly unusual for journals like Nature and Science to have somehow figured out a recipe for value-free science publishing.

But, far from provoking much needed self-reflection, Brown’s article has only evoked polarized and polarizing responses. For those of us who yearn for a more pluralistic and less pathological environmental politics, we’ll have to keep waiting.

UPDATE 9/13/2023: I have edited this piece since posting it to include Brown’s response to various criticisms of his article.