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Sharon F.'s avatar

Just a few additional points to add to Patrick’s excellent essay..I hope it gets distributed widely.

1. If all the research money is going to climate change, then scientists will be tempted to link their studies to climate change. For example invasive species. Since we cannot know that their spread, once they are introduced, is NOT due to climate change, and our research is more likely to be funded if we say it “could be” due to climate change, it facilitates getting funded and at the same time leads people not in the system to think “everything bad that happens is due to climate change.” No one is lying here... it’s a problem with the system.

2. All the disciplines involved in solutions get left out.. in fact, now the press thinks atmospheric modelers know more about everything than the previously existing disciplines and the hundreds of years of knowledge about the past and the present, and about actually doing activities and how that contributes or not to solutions. Sometimes I look back at the history of science and say “is this a resurgence of physics over other disciplines... post atomic bomb they needed something positive?” Or “atmospheric physics is all?”

Or is it a reaction to the perceived divide between the déclassé applied sciences (solutions) and more basic sciences, who now not only want their seat at the policy table, but want to kick others out. And engineering, which you think would be key to decarbonization is seemingly nowhere to be found.

3. Finally, let’s think about COVID. Suppose we had funded only research into projecting what bad things could happen instead of vaccines and other solutions? We might have many papers on “projections of Covid-19 epidemic effects on wine harvesting workers in 2070” instead of.. vaccines. If I were high up in any of the science institutions, I would argue that if climate is an emergency, we should devote all our research funding to solutions with just enough work on projections to keep up with IPCC. Anyway, we are hollowing out the solutions disciplines, generating more climate policy students who can talk and write, and scientists who model. This doesn’t seem very helpful- unless the intent is to generate fear and despair.

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Roger Pielke Jr.'s avatar

UPDATE: The chief editor of Nature has issued a clearly threatening response to Brown's essay:

“We are now carefully considering the implications of his stated actions; certainly, they reflect poor research practices and are not in line with the standards we set for our journal”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12488605/editor-nature-journal-climate-change-scientist.html

No such statement was made about Proximal origins or the Alimonti retraction

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