You may recall that last month climate scientist Professor Patrick T. Brown of the Breakthrough Institute caused a bit of a furore by pointing out how extreme weather event attribution studies invariably restrict their quantification to climatic causation only, thereby excluding quantification of the non-climatic. It was suggested that this may serve those involved in such studies, since they are much more likely to get their papers accepted in prestigious journals that are attracted towards the resulting simplified narrative. Professor Brown admitted that he was one of that self-serving community and questioned whether a change of attitude might better serve the science.

The response from those who adhere to the simplified narrative was predictable, and I reported on their howls of outrage here and here. I have to say, however, it all seems to have gone quiet now. Presumably the likes of Carbon Brief and Ken Rice of ATTP fame feel there is nothing more to be said following their debunking efforts. It’s a job well done, as far as they are concerned. I too should know better and let sleeping dogs lie, but that’s not my style. So I will endeavour here to keep the issue alive by looking at another supposed debunking of Professor Brown, mainly because I want to show just how atrociously inept that effort was, but also because of the relevance of the organisation attempting the rebuttal.

A group on a mission

The supposed debunking I wish to focus upon today comes from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment (yes, the institute that employs Professor Friederike Otto, extreme event attributor extraordinaire). To be precise, the individual responsible is none other than the institute’s Policy and Communications Director, Bob Ward, who’s hit piece is titled ‘Newspapers are using climate researcher’s false claims about journal bias to mislead readers’.

Ward comes with a suitably impressive curriculum vitae that includes membership of the board of the Association of British Science Writers; a membership that makes the nature of his error-strewn, hopelessly confused and egregiously misleading attack on Patrick Brown all the more unforgivable. The bad faith starts early on when Ward first refers to Professor Brown’s article written for The Free Press:

“However, the lead author on the paper, Dr Patrick Brown, caused controversy by writing another article in which he appeared to admit that he had been forced to alter his research to publish it in the top scientific journal”.

Well Brown either did or did not admit. To say he ‘appeared to admit’ already smacks of spin. As for being ‘forced’, these are Ward’s words, not Brown’s. In fact, at no stage did Brown talk of being forced to do anything. Nor did he use any synonym of that word. Nor did he ever admit to altering his work to get it published. Once again, this is pure spin from Ward. The real issue was the desire to restrict scope so as not to overcomplicate and dilute the narrative, thereby increasing the likelihood of being accepted for publication.

This is not a good start by Ward. But it gets much worse. Ward goes on to quote Brown as saying:

I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

To which Ward responds:

This is an incendiary claim. It is also untrue.

To back up his own incendiary claim that Brown is not speaking the truth, Ward refers to comments made by the Nature referees who had peer-reviewed Brown’s paper. Unfortunately, and quite surprisingly in view of Ward’s membership of the board of the Association of British Science Writers, he blatantly misrepresents the review dialogue. According to Ward:

These comments showed that one of the referees recommended that the paper needed significant revision, and challenged Dr Brown and his co-authors about the focus on temperature as a driver of wildfires, while excluding other factors such as humidity.

Here Ward is alluding to the comments of referee number three. This is what that referee actually wrote:

The climate change scenario only includes temperature as input for the modified climate. However, changes in atmospheric humidity would also be highly relevant for predicting changes in VPD or fuel moisture.

So whilst Ward wrote ‘factors such as humidity’, the referee actually wrote ‘humidity’.

This matters because atmospheric humidity is just another climatic factor, and yet the issue is supposed to be about the quantification of the non-climatic. Ward implies that Brown was asked to extend the scope of his quantified attribution to include the non-climatic and yet clearly referee three never made such a request. Ward’s innocent-looking ‘factors such as’ was a gross error at best, and a lie at worst.

In a generous mood, I could argue that Ward was not being deliberately misleading here but had simply conflated the comments of referee three with referee one, who had indeed mentioned non-climatic factors. Nevertheless, in the case of referee one, the concern had been that Brown’s chosen metric (wildfire growth) could be potentially misleading due to confounding, non-climatic factors. Referee one was merely suggesting that these factors should be controlled for. So even this could not be used as evidence that Brown had been asked to extend the scope of his study in order to quantify non-climatic causations. Besides which, Ward specifically refers to ‘one of the referees’ and so conflation of referee one and referee three’s comments would be a significant obfuscation on his part.

Another possible excuse for Ward’s ‘confusion’ is that Brown himself brings up non-climatic factors in one of his replies. But Brown was just pointing out what everyone, including the referees, knew to be the case – that quantification of non-climatic factors is very difficult and complicates the narrative. These difficulties could not be taken as his reason for declining a request to quantify the non-climatic, simply because it is obvious from the review dialogue that the referees had not at any stage made such a request. Instead, they seemed perfectly happy with an attribution that controlled for the non-climatic in order to keep things simple. That said, it is true that Brown himself argues that a simplified narrative has certain merits and he volunteers that he was aiming for simplicity. It also has to be said that it wasn’t until after the paper was published that he disclosed his full reasons for adhering to the simple narrative.

Whichever way you look at it, Ward’s emphatic rebuttal of Brown’s allegations is emphatically unsupported by the referee comments, and he could only find support in them through misrepresentation or obfuscation; hardly the performance you would want to see from the Policy and Communications Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. Worst still, Ward would surely have been aware that Professor Brown, by excluding non-climatic factors in his quantification, wasn’t doing anything that the institute’s very own Friederike Otto also does on a routine basis. Everyone, including those within the Grantham Institute, is focusing upon quantifying climatic causation of events, and no one is comparing the impacts of the climatic against the non-climatic. That is Brown’s point.

As a further irony, the Grantham Institute’s Professor Otto actually agrees with Patrick Brown that much more needs to be done to focus upon the non-climatic factors in natural disasters. In this paper she argues:

These hazards are, in many cases, not purely natural anymore, as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Nevertheless, also unnatural hazards only become disasters when they interact with exposure and vulnerability….A fact that is often missing from the public discussions and even the summary for policy makers of the synthesis report of the IPCC 6th assessment report mention vulnerability only once (paragraph A2.2) in the context of current impacts but not at all with respect to adaptation…A focus solely on climate and hazard in the context of disasters creates a discourse that deflects responsibility from the human actions that produce vulnerability and often also exposure.

But the ultimate irony is that, because this paper got published, it was cited by climate scientist Richard Black as proof that Brown is wrong about the bias! In fact, one idiot who reported upon this had this to say about Professor Otto:

“[Her] work has practically won her household-name status as a climate Cassandra, a high-profile career she apparently doesn’t mind risking by countering Brown’s alleged narrative.

Surely he meant ‘risking by agreeing’. Otto is actually endorsing Brown’s concerns.

Finally, Ward further demonstrates his parlous disregard for important detail when he says:

Dr Brown’s allegations are further undermined by the fact that Nature has published articles that consider other factors that drive wildfires.

For his counter-example he then cites a published paper that does indeed ‘consider’ other factors. But this was never about mere consideration; this is a matter of the quantification of causality, which Ward’s chosen example singularly fails to do with regard to non-climatic causes. Once again, I am left puzzled as to how someone in Ward’s position could be so careless with the issues. He talks of Brown’s allegations being ‘demonstrably false’, but the only thing I think is demonstrated by Ward’s article is his own incompetence.

Mission unaccomplished

It is not surprising that the folk at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment should be in the forefront of those seeking to discredit Professor Brown, since it is they, more than any other group, who have helped to promote the simplified narrative that Brown now challenges. What is surprising, however, is the shoddy and inept effort they have made of it. A good debunking would have to start with a careful reading of the referees’ comments and a clear and unambiguous account of them. It also requires a proper grasp of the issues and an understanding that ‘consider’ and ‘quantify’ are quite different verbs. Regrettably, none of these imperatives seemed to have been within Ward’s capacity to uphold, leading him to falsify and mislead. So it is somewhat ironic that he should then refer to Brown’s ‘false claims’ and bemoan that newspapers are misleading readers. Obviously, that is the message he would like everyone to take away from the saga, since the alternative would be to start questioning the credibility of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. If Ward thinks that his article has put the record straight, then I would have to say that he has grossly underestimated the scale of the task and the standard of critical thinking required.