I don’t know why I felt so strongly about this as a child, but learning about the Hitler Youth put me right off the idea of joining any form of juvenile club. Maybe it was the uniforms and campsite revelry that I distrusted the most. It all starts off innocently enough with a Ging Gang Gooly, but it doesn’t take too long before a lusty rendition of Tomorrow Belongs To Me breaks out. There was something about organised camaraderie that just didn’t appeal. And that is why I felt a little shudder when I recently came across The Climate Club, and its avowed mission:

The Climate Club engages young scholars to deliver digestible information on climate, sustainability, and environmental health. Through our platform, we aim to not only communicate science and combat misinformation, but to also empower young scientists across the world to voice their perspectives and write evidence-based, non-biased articles to engage the public in critical thinking and active reasoning.

All this talk of ‘combat’, ‘active reasoning’ and an empowered youth across ze vorld sounds just a tad gung-ho to me. It just looks too much like an incitement to activism; a form of engagement made even more explicit by a charming little children’s book I also discovered recently, titled ‘The First Rule of Climate Club’. It is written by an ex-schoolteacher called Carrie Firestone, who seems intent on ensuring that young and impressionable minds are called to arms in the fight against whatever has been unnerving the average Guardian reader of late. The social benefits of indoctrination have never been knowingly undersold and it seems that the ‘engagement’ starts very young. All very alluring and character-building I’m sure, but not for me.

Actually, when I think about it, my aversion to the comforts of the cultish was very much behind my embryonic attraction to science. Here was a way of life in which the acceptance of the fact didn’t seem to depend too much upon receiving ‘digestible information’ administered from a suitably endorsed ‘platform’. All that mattered is that Nature should be consulted every now and then to see what she thought of it all. It was the perfect paradigm for the youth who flattered himself as being an independent thinker.

My new-found second favourite climate scientist, Professor Patrick Brown, obviously feels the same way, judging by the essay he wrote back in 2017. The title of his piece is ‘The fact illusion: Objective truth is elusive in (climate) science’ and in it Professor Brown explores misconceptions regarding the nature of science in the raw.  He starts off with a statement that I suspect few empirical sceptics could find issue with:

However, contrary to a popular notion, science can rarely be thought of as an authoritative body that simply swoops in and declares various statements as fact or fiction, true or false. Instead, science is a loosely-defined activity, conducted not by a central authority but by a myriad of competing organizations and individuals all over the world. Thus, our collective confidence in various scientific conclusions inevitably has to result from the subjective weighing of evidence rather than deference to a supreme authority.

He then develops the theme of the essay by asking a rhetorical question: Is science the Vatican or The Wild West? Brown opines that most people outside of science see it as the former, when the reality is that it is more like the latter. This he sees as one of science’s greatest advantages. As he puts it:

Science has its flaws (as all human endeavors do) but its decentralized nature and its incentive structure make it very difficult to corrupt.

Difficult, maybe, but ‘very difficult’, I am not so sure about. And given his recent experience, I suspect that Professor Brown must be having second thoughts. In his 2017 essay, he writes:

[S]cientists are humans and humans are social beings who are influenced by the zeitgeist of their proximate culture. Unfortunately, as political polarization has increased in the United States, many of us are becoming more and more hermetically sealed into our ideological bubbles where our ideas are not challenged and we only hear from other people who agree with us. I do worry that this phenomenon has the power to influence the collective research output and communication of climate science.

So he was worried, but not that worried. However, in a recent tweet on the platform formerly known as Twitter, but now known as ‘X, formerly known as Twitter’, he said this:

I wrote this in 2017, and it has significant overlaps with my Free Press essay that resulted in a lot of controversy…In the intervening six years, my opinion moved away from a feeling of ‘caution’ regarding biases in high-profile papers and much more towards a feeling of ‘concern’.

In my introduction I alluded to the comforts of the cultish. Of course, I didn’t mean to be taken literally; I’m not saying that the climate science community, or organisations such as The Climate Club, should be seen as cults. But it still has to be said that the outcry caused by Professor Brown’s Free Press article does look a little like the sort of treatment a former member can expect to receive when they try to leave a cult; demonization and disownment seemed to be the order of the day. The problem is that being a bit like the Wild West is not an altogether good thing. Certainly, it was all about the pioneering spirit, loosely governed, but it was also a society that operated through the benefit of lynch mobs and posses that tend to look dimly upon people who step out of line.

Consequently, we have Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, saying that what Brown had done was ‘monumentally unethical’.  We have Lisa Schipper, professor of development geography at the University of Bonn, saying that Brown’s actions were ‘very, very weird behaviour indeed’. We have Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director of the Grantham Reasearch Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, referring to Brown’s ‘bogus narrative’. We have former BBC environment correspondent Richard Black accusing Brown of reviving the ‘ancient canard’ of journal bias. And to cap it all we have that paragon of academic propriety, Michael Mann, saying, ‘If I were Patrick Brown’s PhD adviser, I would regard this as a personal failure’. Worse still, Mann goes on to show how utterly clueless he is by referring to Professor Ken Rice’s ‘expertly detailed’ account of the ‘sordid tale’ — an account that was so expertly detailed that it reproduced nothing of Brown’s article and managed to completely misconstrue the relevance of his dialogue with the Nature referees.

What makes all of the above really rather shocking is that Patrick Brown had not actually said anything that wasn’t demonstrably true (i.e. that there is a self-evident and worrying lack of quantification of non-climatic causations in published attribution studies). He just had the temerity to suggest that a journalistic penchant for the simple, climate-focused narrative was playing a role in the resulting imbalance. So all he had done was to faithfully and accurately described some of the workings of Climate Club, when the first rule is that you don’t talk about Climate Club.

The desire to cast him out is just human nature really, but I fear it also comes with a good dose of human nurture. I’d like to believe that, in the hands of the next generation, climate science could become a broader church than the Vatican, without descending into the Wild West. But when I see that aspiring young climate scientists can join up with an organisation that actually calls itself The Climate Club, and then I see a children’s book carrying the title, ‘The First Rule of Climate Club’, I have to admit to being just a little pessimistic.

12 Comments

  1. John,

    I found my way to the Climate Club website. It seems to be some sort of an emanation of Columbia University. Are they particularly influential, do you know? I have been unable to find anything out about their funding sources, though they must have a reasonable amount of dosh, looking at the number of people involved with them, at least a few of whom I assume are paid for their work.

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  2. Mark,

    I know nothing about the funding or foundation of the Climate Club. That’s something I would have to look into.

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  3. John,

    I realise it’s peripheral to your article, but I never cease to be amazed just how many of these organisations there are, how many people they “employ”, how inter-linked they are, etc, etc. Big Green certainly has lots of money.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Regarding the pre-approved narratives, this by the WSJ 10 days ago:

    “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science
    Especially in climate and Covid research, abuse of peer review and self-censorship abound.”

    Paywalled at:

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-preapproved-narratives-corrupt-science-false-studies-covid-climate-change-5bee0844

    Refers to the Brown affair and some examples of the preferred narrative in Covid studies (where studies reaching the “wrong” conclusion are unwelcome, even on preprint servers).

    A small excerpt from the conclusion:

    Scientific journals and preprint servers aren’t selective about research quality. They’re selective about the conclusions. If experts want to know why so many Americans don’t trust “science,” they have their answer. Too many scientists no longer care about science.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Also – not paywalled this time – by Bhattacharya and Hanke on censorship of (Covid) papers going against the preferred narratives on the preprint servers: https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1276/BhattacharyaHankeSept2023.pdf

    First come the “factcheckers” who produce unfounded, irrelevant verbiage that lacks critical sense or analytical insight (for example, Evon 2022). Next come hit pieces that echo the claims of the so-called fact-checkers. The perpetrators hope that a cone of silence, aided by censorship at preprint servers, will descend on the counter-narrative scientific findings. They lead people down a road that leads to the end of truth.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. Jit,

    Thank you for the links. Another article on the same theme has been written by Professor Fenton recounting his own experiences with the preprint servers. The evidence he presents is quite damning:

    https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/censored-by-the-academic-preprint

    I know that Jaime Jessop is a keen follower of Fenton’s work and so she may very well have provided this link before me. I’m getting on and my memory isn’t the best.

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  7. Mark,

    I can’t find a lot about The Climate Club; their website isn’t very informative. However, whilst searching for stuff, two things became apparent:

    Firstly, the term ‘Climate Club’ has been used more than once and seems to apply to various initiatives taken within schools. Take this initiative, for example:

    https://www.groundwork.org.uk/projects/climate-clubs/

    Although school Climate Clubs are not explicitly encouraged by the UK Government, they are very much in keeping with the ambitions for the education system spelt out in the Department of Education’s policy paper, Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems’:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sustainability-and-climate-change-strategy/sustainability-and-climate-change-a-strategy-for-the-education-and-childrens-services-systems

    Secondly, although a bit off-topic, it would be remiss of me not to mention the ‘G7 Climate Club’:

    Click to access EPRS_ATA(2023)739385_EN.pdf

    As the ‘At a Glance’ document explains:

    “The idea behind a climate club has its roots in club theory, originally proposed by Buchanan in 1965. Club theory postulates that a mechanism of ‘clubs’ is needed to overcome the tendency towards free-riding in international agreements, i.e. reaping the benefits without bearing a fair share of the costs.”

    I wonder how that is going.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Here is a Sunday quiz for you. Who wrote this?

    “I desperately want the IPCC reports to serve as a means to cut through hyperbole and provide an anchor to which important decisions can be tethered. The realization that they cannot provide this service is a depressing one for a scientist in the field—and should be, as well, for readers who are otherwise misled into expecting catastrophe. Reform is needed to restore the credibility of the reports and climate science more generally. Only once these reports are able to be seen as objective analyses, will their recommendations warrant serious consideration by decision-makers and the public.”

    No, it wasn’t anyone from Cliscep, although it might well have been. It is, in fact, from the pen of climate scientist, Prof. Patrick T. Brown, and it is an extract from the following article:

    “The IPCC Report on the Impacts of Climate Change is Depressing: But not for the reasons you might think”

    https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environment/the-ipcc-report-on-the-impacts-of-climate-change-is-depressing

    The article exposes the tricks that the IPCC has been up to in its attempts to portray climate change as having an entirely negative impact on agriculture. And when I look at it, and others that Brown has written, I can well understand why the Climate Club would wish to see him expelled.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. I overlooked this when it first came out so I’m a little late to be commenting upon it, but it is an article on the Patrick Brown affair that is just too off-the-wall to go unchallenged.

    https://skepticalscience.com/patrick-brown-hallucination.html

    It appeared on John Cook’s Skeptical Science blog and was written by a broadcast engineer and former software architect called Doug Bostrom. It’s titled: ‘Patrick Brown’s recycled hallucination of climate science’, and it is clear that Bostrom feels that his own broadcast engineering background fully qualifies him to identify when a professor of climate science is issuing an “impulsively emotional blurt” rather than sharing his expert understanding of how extreme event attribution papers are typically constructed for publication. Bostrom is not happy because he believes that Brown’s “osteoporotic rhetorical skeleton” has provided succour that has “poured like sweet music into the desperately thirsty and pathetically grateful ears of climate science deniers spanning the globe.”

    Oh dear. Talk about a rattled cage.

    I think the highlight of the article is a long list of published papers that Bostrom thinks provides proof that Brown’s concerns regarding a lack of quantification of non-climatic factors is just a “silly conspiracy theory”. Taking Bostrom’s research in good faith, I looked at the first paper on his list. Of the so-called ‘bottom-up’ causations that are presupposed (but notably not demonstrated) to be subordinate to climate change impact, the paper said:

    “An illustration of bottom-up impacts is shown in an area of central BC, with a focus around the 2021 Sparks Lake Fire, near the city of Kamloops (Fig. 5). Although it is beyond the scope of this study to provide a synthesis of the effects of disturbances on wildfire occurrence, this map illustrates the magnitude and extent of landscape changes that have occurred in the decades prior to the 2021 wildfire season. Along with more accurate climate projections, gaining a better understanding of how natural and anthropogenic disturbances affect subsequent fire ignition and growth on BC landscapes is critical to improving forecasts of future wildfire activity, either for the next season or over the next few decades. This is a formidable task, however, given the diversity of BC’s vegetation types and their complex interactions with climate and disturbance regimes.”

    As Brown said, although other causative factors are understood to be important, their comparative quantification is usually deemed ‘beyond the scope’ and ‘a formidable task’. The paper proves Brown’s point and has only appeared on Bostrom’s list because other factors were considered — before being declared out of scope!

    I didn’t bother looking at any of the other papers on the list. Clearly, Bostrom is another ‘expert’ who doesn’t understand the difference between ‘consider’ and ‘quantify’. But it didn’t stop him from joining the Climate Club chorus venting its spleen.

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