"Last week, I described our paper on climate change and wildfires. I am very proud of this research overall. But I want to talk about how moulding research presentations for high-profile journals can reduce its usefulness & actually mislead the public....
"I mentioned that this research looked at the effect of warming in isolation but that warming is just one of many important influences on wildfires with others being changes in human ignition patterns and changes in vegetation/fuels.
"So why didn’t I include these obviously relevant factors in my research from the outset? Why did I focus exclusively on the impact of climate change? Put simply, I've found that there is a formula for success for publishing climate change research in the most prestigious and widely-read scientific journals and unfortunately this formula also makes the research less useful.
"1) The first thing to know is that simply *showing* that climate change impacts something of value is usually sufficient, and it is not typically necessary to show that the impact is large compared to other relevant influences....
"This type of framing, where the influence of climate change is unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential 'Nature' paper, they calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture.
"However, that paper does not mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: temperature-related deaths have been declining, and agricultural yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change....
"3) A third element of a high-profile climate change research paper is to focus on metrics that are not necessarily the most illuminating or relevant but serve more to generate impressive numbers.... The sacrifice of clarity for the sake of more impressive numbers was probably necessary for it to get into 'Nature' [magazine]....
"So why did I follow this formula for producing a high-profile scientific research paper if I don’t believe it creates the most useful knowledge for society? I did it because I began this research as a new assistant professor facing pressure to establish myself in a new field and to maximize my prospects of securing respect from my peers, future funding, tenure, and ultimately a successful career. To put it bluntly, I sacrificed value added for society in order to mold the presentation of the research to be compatible with the preferred narratives of the editors and reviewers of high-profile journals.
"I am bringing these issue to light because I hope that highlighting them will push for reforms that will better align the incentives of researchers with the production of the most useful knowledge for society."~ climate scientist Patrick T. Brown explaining his modus on this Twitter thread. He writes more about it here: 'I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published,' and offers more thoughts on his blog: 'The Not-so-Secret Formula for Publishing a High-Profile Climate Change Research Paper.'
RELATED, from Bryan Caplan, 'Tenure Is a Total Scam: A tenured professor plays whistleblower':
"I’m a tenured professor. In normal English, that means I have a dream job for life. Which is even more fantastic than it sounds. 'Fantastic,' that is, for we tenured professors. From the viewpoint of the taxpayers and donors who subsidize us, however, this system is a total scam. An outrage. A travesty."Dear reader, I propose to give you a guided tour of the tenure system: How you get tenure, what tenure means in practice, and the laughable efforts of the professoriat to defend this affront to the word 'job' ...."
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