28 Comments

1. Perhaps a fruitful approach would be to search for Nature papers that sought out a relationship between a problem – any problem – and climate change, and didn’t find one. There are all sorts of reasons why such papers should be numerous, and all sorts of reasons why they should be rare. I’m guessing I know which way the piece of jam on toast fell.

   There was an article in the Sunday Telegraph today about a small controversy in historical circles. A historian had made some outlandish claims about colonial appropriation of iron-making technology. This comment by one of the academics pushing back rather resonated with matters climatique:

   Prof Goldman said that he thought the academic was “a victim of the system” which “encourages young researchers to choose certain types of subject, and, in order to stand out in the crowd, to reach surprising or even sensational conclusions, irrespective of the evidence,” with “any research that is in tune with academic fashion and the ‘zeitgeist’ is likely to be published and celebrated”.

   [Sic.]

   https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/16/oxford-scholars-debunk-industrial-revolution-hero-theft-claim/

   …if you are able to access the page.

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2. Jit,

   They say this sort of thing goes on all the time and there is nothing special about climate science.

   But climate science is special, oh so very special.

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3. Thanks for taking one for the team. I’m afraid I gave up on the Youtube video pretty quickly.

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4. The idea that Brown was ‘forced’ to publish his paper, narrowly focussed on the impacts of climate change (temperature) is of course, “nonsense”, as Dr Ken Rice points out. But Ken Rice is presenting a straw man. How unusual Ken! Not like you at all! It is nonsense, but not for the reasons Ken Rice implies. Because Patrick Brown alleged nothing of the sort. What he did allege is that if he had CHOSEN to quantify some of the non-climatic factors which might have diluted the ‘clean’ message of his paper, then he is certain that he would have faced major difficulty getting his paper published in a prestigious journal like Nature, precisely because the editorial bias re. climate change papers is such journal is skewed strongly towards the publication of such ‘clean’ narratives. There’s a big difference between a scientist being forced to restrict research to a very narrow focus and between making the conscious choice to restrict one’s research in order to maximise one’s chances of publication in prestigious journals. There’s also a big difference between citing one particular example of a general rule in order to illustrate the general rule and using that particular example to infer the existence of the general rule. Dr Rice alleges that that Brown did the latter, whereas in fact he did the former. Is there no limit to how far Dr Rice will misrepresent the facts in order to publicly present his chosen narrative?

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5. Jaime,

   That annoyed me too. It seems to be a new phenomenon that people claim to steelman when all they are doing is trying to boost their straw man argument. They are attempting to portray themselves as reasonable people who are prepared to respect the strengths of an opposing argument, when the reality is they are just up to the usual straw man tricks. I thought there was a lot of that coming from Ken Rice on the podcast and the final straw [man] for me was when he and his interviewer started cooking up this phoney line that Brown (as someone else has put it) had only his own naughtiness to offer as evidence. There was also the phoney portrayal of Brown as claiming to be the only scientist in the world to see where all of the rest of the climate scientists were going wrong — teehee. In fact, Brown was pointing out that he belonged to a community that knew exactly what it was doing. He wasn’t discerning anything that wasn’t already blatantly obvious — attribution studies only ever control for the non-climatic. That is how everyone has agreed to do it because they are all focused on a particular narrative. All Brown was doing was pointing out what such a narrow focus can result in. Again, such implications were something everybody would already have been aware of but not been terribly concerned about. It is isn’t ignorance that is the problem, it is poor policy.

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6. Mark,

   I don’t see it as taking one for the team because I was driven by personal curiosity. Dr Rice’s initial posting on ATTP was of so little substance (no quotes, no citations, no developed argument, just a set of opinions) that I was hoping that he would use the opportunity to add substance to his contribution. After all, Dr Rice had basically accused Dr Brown of lacking standards and declared him no longer to be respected. These are serious criticisms that must be ably justified. Alas, even after 15 minutes it was obvious that Dr Rice had not properly understood the issues (i.e. that this is about what the attribution community accepts as an adequately quantified causal analysis) and had just found an equally unqualified colleague with which to share his misconceptions. It was nothing more than a televised version of his hatchet job on a fellow academic. I very quickly lost my stomach for it.

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7. Well, I can report that Ken Rice has noticed this item and has shared his thoughts on his own blog, ATTP. Unfortunately, it hasn’t led to any meaningful dialogue, cross-blog or otherwise. It seems the only points arising are:

   a) Ken Rice would like to be referred to as ‘Professor’, but he doesn’t want to appear precious about it.

   b) It looks like he is more than satisfied with his current line of argument and does not wish to dignify my suggestions with a professorial response. Well that’s alright. I wasn’t actually expecting the good professor to take up the challenge. I was simply indicating the difference between a scientific analysis and what he is doing.

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8. Oh no! My submission to the prestigious ATTP website has been rejected. Apparently two of its leading reviewers recommended against it:

   Reviewer 1: “John’s proposed analysis would be useless. The relevant analysis would only need to show that there are papers published that include other causal factors. And that’s what people have shown to indicate that Patrick’s argument is faulty.”

   Reviewer 2: “In fairness, JR’s analysis may not serve any constructive purpose. As a mere counterfactual, it could still be useful as a rhetorical device to raise infinite concerns.”

   According to Reviewer 1, the basic problem is that I think I am an expert on statistics, when it is obvious to him that I am not. However, you don’t suppose this rejection has anything to do with there being a preferred narrative on that website, do you?

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9. It’s surprising how much mileage can be gained by steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the central issue. For example, Professor Richard Betts recently tweeted the following:

   “I don’t know why Patrick Brown is still saying ‘there is a taboo against studying increases in resilience to climate’… IPCC Working Group 2 has loads on resilience, in fact the very first figure is on climate resilient development”.

   I took a look at the relevant chapter of IPCC Working Group 2, and sure enough there is lots of talk about what can be done to adapt to climate change. But, of course, that isn’t what Patrick Brown was talking about. He is bemoaning the lack of interest in quantifying the non-climatic factors in attribution studies. This is relevant to resilience studies because only by measuring relative contributions to causation can one establish a measured basis for prioritising so-called resilience strategies. Nowhere does IPCC Working Group 2 mention the need for such research (at least there is nothing said in the executive summary, where it should be). Even more fundamentally, a failure to perform such an analysis means that one can’t even apply the term ‘exacerbation’ with any confidence. If it means factors that heighten the impact of the primary threat, then we need to know what the primary threat is. Patrick Brown has pointed out that, at least with respect to wildfires, we don’t even know what that is, though we proceed on the assumption that we do. Indeed, if it were possible to determine that climate change is not the primary driver of risk, then you would have to concede that it is only a factor that exacerbates a more fundamental problem, such as recent trends in forest management.

   https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-18/

   Here’s a general rule worth considering. When someone of previous good standing appears to you to have said something ridiculous, you should consider the possibility that you have missed their point.

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10. Since I have mentioned more than once Friederike Otto’s output in the context of the Patrick Brown controversy, I thought it might be helpful to illustrate the issues arising by reference to her group’s latest attribution study: “Interplay of climate change-exacerbated rainfall, exposure and vulnerability led to widespread impacts in the Mediterranean region”.

    Click to access Scientific_report_Libya_Greece_floods.pdf

    The report follows what is now a well-established standard format. Sections 1-6 describe the quantification of the increased threat resulting from climate change. Section 7 concludes the risk assessment by then focusing upon exposure and vulnerabilities. However, exposure and vulnerabilities are only discussed and no attempt is made to quantify this element of the risk equation.

    One can take the view that this undermines Patrick Brown’s assertion that studies seem to invariably focus upon the threat resulting from climate change without addressing non-climatic factors. However, the point to note is that Patrick Brown makes it clear that it is a failure to extend the attribution studies to the quantification of the non-climatic that poses the problem. In that respect, the work of Professor Otto perfectly illustrates his point. As a result of the failure to quantify the exposure and vulnerability aspects of the risk calculation, there are key questions that remain unanswered. For example, with respect to the Libyan disaster, we are not in a position to answer either of the following:

    a) Had there been no AGW, and the rainfall had therefore not been 50% greater, would the damns have failed anyway?

    b) Had the damns been properly maintained, would they have remained intact, despite having to deal with the increased rainfall attributed to AGW?

    One could argue that the uncertainties and imponderables involved render answers to these questions quite impossible. However, when it comes to local rainfall events of single day duration, you would be surprised how uncertain the climate threat calculations are as a result of climate model limitations. Uncertainty and speculation is the name of the game.

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11. Oh God John, that ‘attribution’ study is hopeless. WWA say:

    “The uncertainty in these estimates are high and encompass the possibility of no detectable change, but there are multiple reasons we can be confident that climate change did make the events more likely: from theory we know that an increase in rainfall intensity of around 10%, would be expected given current warming levels, so we could only report that there has been no change if there was a well-known dynamic process counteracting this effect, which there is not. Studies focussing on extreme rainfall with future warming also show an increase in heavy rainfall, rendering it probable that the observed increase in heavy rainfall is indeed a trend due to climate change. For these reasons, we do not give a central estimate of the influence of climate change, as in previous studies, instead giving an upper-bound of the effect.”

    This is madness. Uncertainty is so high that they cannot say for sure whether there has been a detectable change at all in rainfall intensity. But because of Clausius-Clapeyron and a supposed lack of any physical mechanism counteracting the effects of Clausius-clapeyron, the authors assume that it simply MUST have been climate change wot dunnit! There’s a couple of problems with this approach:

    1. There is NO detectable trend in extreme rainfall in the southern Mediterranean region. The authors tell us so:

    “There are however different trends within the region with an increase in heavy rainfall in the more Northern parts, but no trends in the more Southern parts (Zittis et al.,2021) which leads to no discernible signals in heavy precipitation for the region overall(Seneviratne et al.,2021).

    2. There’s no signal for the eastern Mediterranean:

    “A recent review of past and future trends in the Eastern Mediterranean region which encompasses the Greece region above, found locally observed increases in heavy precipitation while the trend only emerges for the whole region with warming from 1.5 C onwards (Zittis et al., 2022).”

    3. The authors contradict themselves because in the actual paper they say:

    “It has been shown that high internal variability masks the climate change signal in several parts of Europe (Kendon et al., 2023; Aalbers et al., 2017) thus leading to no, or smaller trends than expected from thermodynamics.”

    So there IS a physical mechanism which can counteract the effects of Clausius Clapeyron (thermodynamics): it’s called ‘high internal variability’! Furthermore, to my way of thinking, internal variability (dynamics) might be wrongly attributed by Otto-like scientists to Clausius-Clapeyron (thermodynamics = ‘climate change’). Bizarrely, the authors go into detail concerning the proximate cause of this extreme rainfall in Greece, Turkey and Libya, precisely by telling us that is was an Omega blocking high over the Netherlands (which was also responsible for our brief Indian summer by the way) and a cut off low which caused the extreme rainfall over Spain (dynamics). But then they tell us it wasn’t dynamics but it was thermodynamics because nothing exists which can counteract the thermodynamics!!

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12. Jaime,

    I think you are failing to appreciate just how scientifically innovative Otto has been. Traditionally, attribution studies control for the non-climatic in order to focus upon the climatic. All Otto is doing now is to control for the atmospheric dynamics in order to focus upon the thermodynamics. Whatever it takes to get her message across. Do you have a problem with that? 🙂

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13. Or to put it another way, when you ignore all other explanations, the answer then becomes obvious. It’s called climate science. 😉

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14. John,

    “No one can watch the floods in Libya or the extreme heat in Europe this summer, and doubt that it is real and happening.”

    Rishi doesn’t have a problem with that!

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15. Wild Weather Wonder Woman strikes again and the BBC as usual are happy to provide a platform for her to spout her unscientific nonsense:

    “After a summer of devastating heatwaves and wildfires with a very clear climate-change fingerprint, quantifying the contribution of global warming to these floods proved more challenging,” one of the study’s authors, Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London, said.

    “While we have some weather station data over Greece, we don’t have any weather station data over Libya.”

    “Instead, the scientists had to rely on data based on satellite readings.

    But they are confident climate change played a significant role, because there is very strong evidence higher temperatures lead to heavier rainfall and other studies have shown climate change increases the intensity of weather systems such as Storm Daniel.”

    LOL

    This ‘rapid attribution study’ hasn’t yet been published in the peer reviewed literature, but you can bet it will be, because it says all the right things, pays lip service to non climatic factors and unscientifically bigs up the role of climate change.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66854670

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16. I thought I’d have another go at finishing the Gregson podcast, just to make sure I was not missing something. However, I’m afraid it continued very much in the same vein, presenting one straw man after another. All in all I discerned at least 6 major strawmen in the analysis presented:

    Strawman #1: Patrick Brown was claiming a general bias against mentioning, discussing or considering non-climatic factors in published papers.

    In fact, he was not decrying the failure to mention, discuss or consider non-climatic factors in published papers. That would be ridiculous because it is done all the time. However, his was a quantified attribution and he was actually reflecting upon the difficulties of extending quantification to non-climatic factors and then getting such a paper published. This was made explicit in his statements.

    Strawman #2: Patrick Brown had only his own naughtiness to provide as evidence of a general wrong-doing.

    In fact, he was not making an allegation based purely upon his own experience. The proof of the pudding is in the numbers of papers that have been published that quantify both the climatic and non-climatic causations. To do the former one has to control for the non-climatic. To do the latter one has to control for the climatic. Simply mentioning, discussing or considering non-climatic causal factors is not at issue; it is their quantification by controlling for the climatic that matters. Once one counts only those papers that control for the climatic, the bias becomes very obvious.

    Strawman #3: Papers are focused on single issues all the time. That doesn’t imply that there is any truth being hidden.

    Full quantification is the essential issue here because only by quantifying both the climatic and non-climatic causations can we have a measured basis for prioritising risk management strategies. In fact, without such quantification the very idea that climate change is the root causation exacerbated by non-climatic factors should be treated as an unproven assertion. There is an alternative narrative that potentially reverses the strength of causations but that isn’t being investigated because no one is doing the full quantification. That is the whole point of Patrick Brown’s assertions. That is the sense in which the full truth is not being revealed.

    Strawman #4: Patrick Brown needs to perform a survey of the published literature before he can make claims of a biased approach.

    The preferred isolation of climatic causations by controlling for the non-climatic is actually standard practice within the extreme event attribution community. For example, every attribution study published by Professor Friederike Otto has done this (notwithstanding that they all have a section 7 discussing non-climatic factors). To that extent, the bias that Brown alludes to is not even a matter that can be disputed. However, Patrick Brown wishes to draw attention to both the advantages and potential drawbacks of that standard practice and speculates upon the extent to which the standardisation of practice is influenced by the desire to emphasise a particular narrative.

    Strawman #5: The reviewers of Patrick Brown’s paper had asked for non-climatic factors to be considered and so he doesn’t even have a point regarding the one paper he uses as an example.

    It is actually true that the reviewers were trying to point out to Brown that non-climatic factors should be considered. However, it should be obvious that they were doing so in order to draw to Brown’s attention that he had failed to control for all of them, thereby compromising his isolation of the climatic causation. It is significant that the paper was accepted once these deconfounding issues were addressed. The fact that the paper was accepted without the quantification of non-climatic factors having to be added to the analysis is equally significant. More to the point, the whole premise for treating Brown as being disingenuous is false. His critics needed to have done a much better job of reading and understanding the review dialogue before jumping to their conclusions.

    Strawman #6: Patrick Brown would like everyone to think he has seen something that all other climate scientists have missed, and this is implausible.

    In fact, Patrick Brown is not pointing out something that has been missed. He is pointing out that the standard approach to climate change attribution studies does not provide a measured basis for a prioritised risk management strategy. This has always been obvious, but it is a telling fact that simply pointing this out to a wider audience has resulted in significant levels of denial and obfuscation from his fellow professionals.

    In summary, the issues raised by Brown are perfectly valid and should be sounding alarming bells. I can’t believe that Brown’s points would have been so badly missed had he been discussing the benefits of a fully quantified causal analysis in any field other than climate science. In what other field requiring risk assessment is it considered acceptable to quantify levels of threat and yet leave levels of vulnerability unquantified? Moreover, in what other field is the threat uncritically treated as the primary risk factor, without that assumed primacy having been confirmed by recourse to the quantification of contributions from both threat and vulnerability?

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17. Patrick Brown has added an appendix to his previous response given on his website:

    https://patricktbrown.org/

    In it he emphasises his belief in the reality of climate change and that it is almost totally attributable to CO2 emissions. However, he adds:

    “But I also think that the climate science community is overly concerned about ‘giving ammunition’ to the ‘bad side’ who are not fully on board with, e.g., net-zero by 2050 policies. That concern is biasing the literature. I have seen this several times where a reviewer of a paper says something to the effect of ‘the authors should be very careful how this result is presented so that it cannot be used by climate deniers.’ As scientists, we cannot be so careful to mold our results so that they support a message or our science will lose its credibility.”

    Speaking as someone on the ‘bad side’, I can confirm Patrick’s worst fears. Climate science does have a credibility problem.

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18. This should be an interesting interview (I’ll watch it later, so can’t comment yet).

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19. Jit,

    Thank you for finding and posting the Patrick Brown interview. As you suggested it might be, it was a most interesting interview. I was particularly pleased to see Dr Brown suggesting that it was time that journalists started behaving like journalists and challenged scientists rather than meekly accepting everything they say as some sort of objective and unchallengeable truth (18mins 16secs in).

    The other important point raised is that quantification is the key issue. He points out that the preferred narratives are premised upon an assumed difference in magnitudes of impact (say between temperature rises and changes in forest management on wildfire impact). You can’t compare magnitudes without having quantified all factors, and yet this is rarely done. But, as Dr Brown points out, when you look at papers and articles on the subject, climate change is always the headline factor, as if it has been demonstrated that the magnitude of its impact on the relevant metric is dominant. That’s what makes a bias so obvious.

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20. For those who do not wish to invest half an hour of their time, a good synopsis can be found here:

    https://unherd.com/thepost/climate-scientist-why-i-left-out-the-full-truth-in-my-research/

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21. Just as an aside, I went on to the ‘Bad Boy of Science’ website to see the comments that Ken Rice’s interview had attracted. However, try as I may, I was unable to find it. Intriguingly, at the bottom of the list of interviews, there was a message saying that one of the interviews was ‘hidden’. I wonder if that was the one I was looking for and, if so, whether it had been hidden because the penny had finally dropped that Ken Rice’s criticisms of Dr Brown were potentially libelous. Just an idle thought. 🙂

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22. I’ve watched it now. His view on the preferred narrative (“climate change: it’s worse than we thought”) is a familiar one to sceptics. It’s quite obvious, and as the opening post points out, the bias in the literature (on this more broadly and the isolation of climate change impacts in particular) could be quantified by a researcher determined to destroy their nascent career. That the wider bias manifests itself in article titles should make their job easier.

    Not mentioned was the potential for the demand for striking “climate change: it’s worse than we thought” papers to lead to deliberate fraud.

    I would also query whether 100% of the warming is due to carbon dioxide – some should be due to the reduction in aerosols, even if you take the view that there is no UHI and no natural variation.

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23. Patrick Brown at least has had the courage to admit that his study on the influence of climate change upon wildfires is almost TOTALLY USELESS as a practical guide to impacts and thus policy.

    “A paper that appropriately accounted for projections in other relevant non-climate factors would probably be inconclusive in even the direction of future wildfire change with uncertainty ranges that overlap with zero. That research – which is more useful research – would tell a much less clean story and would be less likely to be a high-profile paper. This is the sense in which ‘leaving out the full truth’ (other relevant causal factors) made the paper more compelling, which then makes it more worthy of a high-profile venue. This “positive results bias,” where researchers are more likely to submit, and editors are more likely to accept, results that demonstrate a clear significant relationship over an inconclusive one, is a well-known phenomenon.”

    His OBSERVATIONS and those of others confirm that this is a widespread problem re. extreme weather attribution throughout the literature. No need for ‘beliefs’ – this is a fact.

    His ‘belief’ that climate change is ‘real’ and responsible for almost 100% of warming since the pre-industrial era is based on correlation and a very simplistic summing up of radiative forcings from natural (solar and volcanic) and non-natural (GHGs). Judith Curry and others have consistently demonstrated the very real potential errors in this ‘belief’, alas to little avail. The point is though, EVEN if we assume the 1.2C rise in GMST since 1850 is entirely down to humans, the science of the IMPACTS (extreme weather/ice melt/sea level rise etc.) of that warming is so biased that it is virtually useless as a guide to policy because it largely fails to quantify non climate influences and even non anthropogenic dynamical/meteorological climate influences. So even as a ‘believer’ in ‘climate change(TM), Brown has done us all a favour, even us ‘deniers’.

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24. Jit, Jaime,

    The question of how much of the recent warming is anthropogenic is a favourite talking point of the sceptic and so I can understand why you have both picked up on Patrick Brown’s emphatic belief in a 100% attribution. However, at least for the time being, I would prefer to focus upon everything else he said, pretty much all of which I agree with. In particular, I think now would be a good time to reflect upon the extent to which certain high profile climate scientists dominate the narrative. Firstly, there is Michael Mann, who has this to say:

    “The only way to prevent these [wildfire] events from becoming more frequent and more intense is to prevent the continued warming of the planet. And the only way to do that is to decarbonize our economy as rapidly as possible.”

    Friederike Otto tends to be more circumspect in her reports, as evidenced here:

    “Wildfires are complex phenomena that are not driven solely by climate, but also by vegetation properties, land-cover and human activity. Quantifying the effect of climate alone on realised wildfires – for example, on the observed burned area or number of fires – is very difficult (Lui et al., 2022).”

    However, when talking to the press she has no compunction about going full-on Mann:

    “Until we stop burning fossil fuels, the number of wildfires will continue to increase, burning larger areas for longer periods of time.”

    This is what we are dealing with, and this is why Patrick Brown is so right about the bias and why it is so important that he, a climate scientist, has pointed it out.

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25. “The Smoky Wire-…” is a good place to learn about wildfire stuff-

    Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission Webinar September 27

    Mark

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26. Mark K,

    Thank you for the link.

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27. It seems that the howls of outrage emanating from the rattled cage are still reverberating around the internet. Take, for example, this particularly shabby piece of ad hominem issuing from the poisoned pen of a certain Phil Wilson:

    “Patrick Brown’s Stunt Takes Climate Change Denial to a New Plateau”

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-26/patrick-browns-stunt-takes-climate-change-denial-to-a-new-plateau/

    It’s a piece that is as nasty and contemptuous as it is uninformed and shallow. To give you a flavour, here are just a few of its lowlights. It starts, in the time honoured fashion, by referring to a time honoured fashion:

    “A small minority of credentialed experts have, in time honored fashion, always been willing to exchange their reputations for the spoils that corporate strategists and libertarian think tanks are eager to pay.”

    Already, we are seeing here the portrayal of Brown as a money-grabbing scientific whore. Brown’s supposed lack of scruples then forms the centre of the article’s development (do I mean development or disintegration?):

    “Corporations have mastered the art of disabling public scrutiny via the deployment of unscrupulous scholars.”

    This is followed by the strawman that every half-baked critic of Patrick Brown has relied upon:

    “He offered nothing to indicate that editors pressured him to change or tailor his work, but, rather, explained that all researchers understand, via some form of collective osmosis, that only ‘alarmist’ research gets published.”

    Yes we could go with Wilson’s suggestion that Brown had offered a whacky theory of ‘collective osmosis’ or we could do some homework and recognise that Brown was actually referring to the well-established standard approach to quantified attribution studies. But no, we then have this:

    “I suspect that Brown’s Nature piece was planned as a Trojan Horse operation, carefully designed to theatrically enhance one of climate denialism’s favorite storylines – that climate change narratives are shaped by the corrupt interests of academia.”

    Suspicions obviously torment Wilson’s heart.

    Wilson continues with some flamboyant diatribe, including gems such as references to the “tired repertoire of libertarian think tank bromides”, before settling upon using the ultimate strawman that he needs to justify his accusations of a strawman:

    “And the second is a pure strawman – that ‘mainstream’ publications (those not funded by The Koch Foundation, the meat industry or the nuclear power industry) have little interest in exploring other contributors to environmental disasters, such as discarded cigarette butts or arson.”

    Yeesh! The author has obviously not bothered to try to understand the technicalities of the argument. Instead we just have ‘Koch Brothers, blah blah’.

    I won’t go on because you can read the article for yourselves, should you have a taste for vitriolic drivel. Instead, I’ll just leave you with the concluding statement:

    “Brown labors, ultimately, on behalf of the cascading uncertainty rule – the corporate conspiracy to elicit popular trust. Psychopaths are known to smooth talk their victims before killing them.”

    Yes, and sanctimonious, pig-ignorant journalists are known to bad mouth their victims before dismissing them.

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28. John, that’s pretty dreadful. I note that it starts as it means to go on:

    “Climate Scientist” Patrick Brown recently published a piece circulated in Bari Weiss’s ‘The Free Press,’ entitled: ‘I Left Out the Full Truth to Get my Climate Change Paper Published.’ This title should warn readers that they are about to be submerged in the obsequious tropes of energy industry propaganda. Weiss also distributed an opinion piece by Great Barrington Declaration author, immunologist Jay Bhattacharya – platforming academic prostitutes seems to be Bari Weiss’s current passion….

    Although Mr Wilson wrote an article rather than a comment, perhaps he should have read the comments policy of the website where his article appears, before writing as he did:

    Treat members of the community with civility and respect whether you agree with their opinion or not. In the event that you see disrespectful behavior please report it to the editors rather than further inflaming the situation.

    Personal attacks are not acceptable. Let’s stick to a discussion of the issues.

    Mind you, at the website in question, despite saying that “The comment area is for discussion, remember that it is not about winning an argument but rather an exchange of views and insights”, some areas are out of bounds:

    Resilience.org is not the place to debate the reality of climate change. If you want to argue about it, please go elsewhere.

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