Summary – The author talks about issues with the scientific journal review process (fair) and leaves the reader with the idea that climate change isn’t that bad (not fair).

Article Introduction – agree

• I agree with a bunch of the points the author makes broadly about journal papers and academia – professors are often assessed on how many papers they get published, and in how prestigious the journals are in which they are published. This is a rough approximation of their efficacy as researchers, but it’s not perfect, so I’m on board with improving this. Besides very tenured professors who are locked in their ways, I think most young professors and PhDs would get on board with slight changes when determining who gets tenure, professorships, research positions, etc. It’s a really hard problem and not something I’m going to personally solve, but I see where the biases and flaws of external reviewers can have a negative impact.
• I also agree the press is useless sometimes when explaining research to the public. Some writers are better than others, but overall the public still doesn’t understand or trust most scientific findings well (even when they impact on our lives). With that said, it’s hard to explain a collection of, say, 100 climate change articles, to the public in a 5 minute dinnertime news segment. Rather than a deep dive here on scientific communication, I’m going to continue with the article.
• I absolutely get the author’s frustration that fewer people viewing your work means less salary. 
• It would be great if there were an incentive system which worked perfectly to reward well-done research, even if it’s low impact.
• On the other hand, it makes a little bit of sense because if someone’s work is having a major (hopefully positive) impact on society and how people view science, a university should want to compensate them. 
• Overall, a complicated issue that I’m not negating, nor am I solving it here. 

Article Content – disagree

With that all said, the meat of this article is trying to pull people into a conspiracy that “climate change isn’t actually that bad”. The author makes several points which are contradictions to himself, contradictions to widely concluded scientific findings, or distractions to get us there. This is a very dangerous takeaway that I’m guessing most people get when reading the headline or skimming the article. Quotes in italics below are from the article.

• “The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative”
• The most famous science papers over the years are not the ones that go with the status quo – they are the ones that use good science to overturn the status quo.
• Journal companies don’t want to publish papers with weak data, because the research would be overturned and the papers retracted. Additionally, the most prestigious journals have a really high standard for what data can be used, how it is used, and what conclusions are drawn. 
• If this author and his co-authors thought their data couldn’t be included when publishing in Nature, it probably wasn’t as high-quality as he’s implying.

• “So in my recent Nature paper, … I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on wildfire behavior…There are also other factors that can be just as or more important”
• There are hundreds of papers in recent years which discuss impacts of various other factors. Happy to send these over or discuss them individually.
• Lots of other people explore lots of other factors. Not being able to “support the mainstream narrative” is a lousy excuse for not studying them more closely.
• He could have easily chosen to study those other factors and got them published if done well. In this paper, the authors chose instead to focus on how temperature influences wildfire fuel moisture:
• How their goal is framed in his paper’s abstract: “Some portion of the change in wildfire behaviour is attributable to anthropogenic climate warming, but formally quantifying this contribution is difficult because of numerous confounding factors
• Here we use machine learning to quantify empirical relationships between temperature (as well as the influence of temperature on aridity) and the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth (>10,000 acres) in California and find that the influence of temperature on the risk is primarily mediated through its influence on fuel moisture”
• Studying many factors in one paper is challenging, and can lead to a long paper, with research taking place over many years and hundreds of pages. This is an issue for several reasons; number of words is limited, researchers moving to other institutions over time or retiring, too many rounds of revisions, etc.
• As a result, most people simply choose a narrower focus, which is what they did here. If they have data supporting an alternative conclusion, they should absolutely publish and explain in a follow-up paper. No conspiracies needed.

• “A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans”
• This statistic is a distraction – Temperatures and moisture patterns are changing the ways in which wildfires burn, increasing their spread and intensity, so climate change is still increasing their damage.

• “We didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors”
• This is doing research poorly and immorally to get a paper published more quickly. 
• It’s almost always good practice to study more variables when possible. 
• Yes, including more types of data would lead to a longer paper & a longer review process, with more revisions and edits needed, which each take time.
• This is implying he intentionally withheld data for speed rather than accuracy so that each author can publish more papers, and ultimately make more money.
• He may be telling his truth. But extrapolating this to say every other researcher is withholding crucial data for speed and money is conspiratorial, and I don’t think we should do that.

• “... scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change.”
• The author links here to his own paper, which says the following:
• “Even isolating deaths associated with heat, in most locations, deaths have been decreasing over time despite warming (Executive Summary Fig. 2). Adoption of air conditioning and insulation is a major factor that reduces sensitivity to non-optimal temperatures, but other factors (urban characteristics, access to health care, occupational distribution, behavior, information, etc.) appear to be important as well. People in higher-income countries are more resilient to non-optimal temperatures because of greater access to many of the aforementioned resources.”
• It’s great that overall, fewer people are dying from heat-related deaths. But for lower-income countries who can’t install more air conditioning or increase health care access, heat-related deaths increase as temperatures increase.
• This may seem like nit-picking, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that for most countries, solutions aren’t as simple as installing an AC unit to save lives. Real people are dying more often than necessary. This significance is lost when the author gives us a run-on sentence with several big words.
• He implies here that climate change isn’t that big of a deal, which is wrong for the reasons I mentioned, but also lots of other reasons not discussed in this article such as sea level rise, hurricane pattern changes, rainfall, floods, freshwater reduction, loss of biodiversity, etc.
• And that’s fine, I don’t expect him to discuss everything in one article, but let’s not skip over them altogether.
• Regarding crop yields increasing since the 1960s, of course that makes sense, we’ve had massive technological and agricultural upgrades in that time allowing us to grow more stuff. This does not mean tech upgrades (e.g., farming strategies, tractor improvements, genetically modifying plants) will continue outpacing climate change’s impacts forever.
• “If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change”
• This is false, for the reasons stated above.

• “This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach.”
• At the beginning of this article, he lists several headlines which are supposed to give the impression that allegedly only focus on problems – but one of the headlines specifically says “Spain must do more to prepare”, negating his point that studying solutions is unable to “rouse the public – or the press”. Sure, some disaster stories will be read frequently, but I would also argue that most people are very interested in hearing real solutions.
• He’s right that a lot of climate change researchers focus on clarifying that climate change is a massive problem which can best be reduced by cutting emissions – this is because a lot of literature shows the scale of climate change is much larger than can be overcome with combinations of technology adjustments.
• So the very large, recent push of “tech fixes” ends up downplaying climate change’s magnitude in the public eye. Most of the time tech fixes are mentioned in 2023, it’s a deliberate distraction from the real problem. Similar to the way British Petroleum popularised the term “carbon footprint” in early 2000s to distract from their own emissions.
• Yes of course implement them when possible, but mathematically, most tech fixes are going to have a very minor impact. Lots of books and articles on this I can send over if interested. As a climate researcher, this author is definitely aware of this.
• So by re-emphasizing technology, the author is either deliberately distracting from emissions, or contradicting widely held scientific conclusions without evidence.
• Unrelated but interesting: Another bad incentive can pop up here in a different industry, where tech start-ups are encouraged to publicise their climate change tech as much as possible because it makes them money, even if it takes attention away from other, more effective work the public can be doing to tackle climate change.
• I am not saying to put-down all start-ups as many of them definitely have positive impacts (for example, I’ve seen several which reduce natural hazard damage to supply chains), but good for people to be aware of overhyping them.

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