Patrick T. Brown, PhD

Last week, I wrote an opinion piece in The Free Press on perverse incentives in scientific publishing.

I described the strong incentives researchers face to publish high-profile papers and how those incentives naturally push researchers to mold their research questions and the presentation of work so that they are palatable to ‘high-impact’ journals.

I also described how I believe high-profile papers put an inordinate focus on the negative impacts of climate change and underemphasize other relevant areas, especially the study of societal resilience to climate.

I think that this is a problem because I believe that a hyper-focus on seeking out and highlighting negative impacts of climate change represents a lost opportunity to study practical on-the-ground solutions to climate-related problems. Hence, I argued that the incentives facing researchers are not aligned with the production of the most useful knowledge for society.

I have written about these problems in the scientific literature many times before, but this time, I used my own paper on wildfires as an example. My aim was to simultaneously criticize myself and criticize a broader system.

In response, I received a great deal of support for my editorial privately from other Ph.D. researchers who agree with me, are exasperated, and would like to see change, and a lot of very negative public reaction from high-profile climate researchers and journalists, some of whom have characterized my public airing of decisions that I made to increase the likelihood of the publication of my Nature paper as a “scandal.”

Much of the public criticism revolves around highly misleading (and in some cases patently false) claims about the research approach that I took in designing the study and what then transpired during the peer review process. One outlet falsely stated that I manipulated data. The editor-in-chief of Nature incorrectly suggested that peer reviewers instructed me to include changes in non-climate factors in our wildfire projections.

There is much more to be said about why I chose to write my essay and why the issues I raise are important for both the integrity of the climate science endeavor and the efficacy of societal efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. But here I address specifically the false and misleading claims that have been made about my Nature paper and the peer-review process.

Was the publication of my Nature paper, followed by my essay in The Free Press, a hoax or a sting operation?

Absolutely not. When I started working on what would become my Nature paper, I had no intention of writing anything about the publication process. I started doing wildfire research in 2019, and I realized there was an opportunity for a high-profile paper in the fall of 2021. I followed this pathway, shaping the research question and the presentation of the research for a high-profile paper, and submitted it to Nature in the summer of 2022.

I had been bothered by what I saw as strong biases in the scientific literature for a long time, and I started thinking and writing more about this problem as the paper was going through peer review. I gradually realized that I was applying a major double standard, criticizing other researchers’ papers but not my own. Over the course of this past year, and as the Nature paper was getting over the finish line, I decided to write a piece critiquing it. I did not think that my experience was anything exceptional, so I discussed the general incentives facing climate impact researchers and how these incentives make research less useful than it could be.

Did you manipulate data in order to ensure the publication of your paper?

No. As I state in the essay, I chose to frame the research question in my paper narrowly, to focus only on the contribution that climate change was making to wildfire behavior. In doing so, my methodology left out (held constant) the myriad of causal factors that affect wildfire behavior (e.g., non-climate factors like human ignition patterns and fuel loads) and could be altered in the future to mitigate wildfire danger. The paper is honest about leaving those factors out, so there is nothing explicitly wrong with the paper itself. However, at the end of the day, what gets communicated to the public is just part of the story and not the full truth.

This has been standard practice in published peer-reviewed literature that attempts to quantify the impact that climate change is having or will have on a wide range of weather-related phenomena and the resulting impacts that those phenomena have upon society. My Free Press essay simply acknowledged that I, like many others, make these choices, sometimes believing that doing so increases the likelihood that high-impact journals would be interested in the research.

Do you stand by the research findings in your Nature paper? Should it be retracted?

I do stand by the research findings, and there is no basis for retracting the paper on its methods or merits. As I have consistently said, I am proud of the research overall, and I think it significantly advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. There is nothing explicitly wrong with the paper, and it follows the regular conventions of many other papers. My point is simply that molding the presentation of the research for a high-impact journal made it less useful than it could have been.

Did editors or reviewers pressure you into highlighting climate change in your paper?

No. My paper was conceived from the outset to focus exclusively on climate change’s impact on wildfire behavior partially because I thought that would increase its chance of publication in a high-profile journal. I did not claim that editors or reviewers pressured me into highlighting climate change after the submission of the paper. My editorial is about how high-profile venues display preferences for certain research results, and that indirectly solicits research that is customized to those preferences.

Did reviewers ask you to include other non-climate factors in your wildfire projections?

Nowhere in the peer review process did reviewers challenge the usefulness of focusing solely on the impact of climate change when projecting long-term changes in wildfire behavior. The main non-climate factors that I said were important (but held constant) in my essay were ignition patterns and fuel loads. Reviewers brought up ignitions a single time, and fuel loads came up six times. In all cases, reviewers raised these factors in relation to questions about whether my methodology was sufficiently robust to accurately quantify the contribution of climate factors to wildfire growth, not to tell us that we should expand our methodology to include changes in these other non-climate factors in our long-term projections.

Let’s go over them all:

From page 7 of the peer review document,

“The second aspect that is a concern is the use of wildfire growth as the key variable. As the authors acknowledge, there are numerous factors that play a confounding role in wildfire growth that are not directly accounted for in this study (L37-51). Vegetation type (fuel), ignitions ( lightning and people), fire management activities ( direct and indirect suppression, prescribed fire, policies such as fire bans and forest closures) and fire load.”

The reviewer is expressing concern that the “confounding” factors will make it difficult for us to quantify the influence of temperature on wildfire growth in our historical dataset (a relationship we can then use later for our climate change projections). They are implying that it might be easier to quantify the influence of temperature on some other wildfire characteristic other than growth. They are not telling us that we should expand our methodology to include changes in these other non-climate factors in our projections.

In my reply, I pointed out that our models were able to predict wildfire growth well in our historical dataset, even without information on the confounding factors.

From page 8 of the peer review document,

“Did you consider using other fuel moisture variables such as 1 hour and 10 hour fuel that can be important is some fuel types ( grass and shrub etc.)”

“Fuel moisture variables” in this context are climate variables and do not refer to non-climate factors like fuel loads. The reviewer is suggesting ways to better quantify the impact of climate change on wildfires.

From page 9 in the peer review document,

“My main concern is on the robustness of the empirical models due to the extremely unbalanced samples for the binary response variables (extreme vs non-extreme fire days: 380 vs. 18,000) and the very small size for the occurrence samples, especially considering the diverse landscape in California in terms of fuel types and topography.”

The reviewer is concerned that there may not be enough samples of the extreme wildfire growth days that we are studying to get a good quantification of the influence of temperature in our historical dataset (a relationship we can then use later for projections). We demonstrate that the models have good predictive skill on out-of-sample data in our historical dataset.

From page 12 in the peer review document,

“1) 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.”

The reviewer is asking that we include another climate factor (absolute humidity) in our projections, not asking us to consider any non-climate factors in our projections.

In my response, I acknowledge that all climate variables other than temperature (and temperature’s influence on aridity) are held constant in the projections, and I bring up the fact that other non-climate factors are also held constant.

“We agree that climatic variables other than temperature are important for projecting changes in wildfire risk. In addition to absolute atmospheric humidity, other important variables include changes in precipitation, wind patterns, vegetation, snowpack, ignitions, antecedent fire activity, etc. Not to mention factors like changes in human population distribution, fuel breaks, land use, ignition patterns, firefighting tactics, forest management strategies, and long-term buildup of fuels.”

I further articulated my stance that the temperature signal dominates other climate variables in its influence on wildfire behavior, and that is why focusing on warming alone (and not other climate-related changes) was valid for representing the entirety of the influence of climate change.

“Accounting for changes in all of these variables and their potential interactions simultaneously is very difficult. This is precisely why we chose to use a methodology that addresses the much cleaner but more narrow question of what the influence of warming alone is on the risk of extreme daily wildfire growth. We believe that studying the influence of warming in isolation is valuable because temperature is the variable in the wildfire behavior triangle (Fig 1A) that is by far the most directly related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and, thus, the most well-constrained in future projections. There is no consensus on even the expected direction of the change of many of the other relevant variables. We do not believe that absolute humidity is an exception to this, and thus it is just as justifiable to hold it constant as any of the other variables mentioned above. Support for this can be summarized with the following two points…”

This is all to say that if we can hold everything else constant in the projections, then there is no reason we should not also be able to hold absolute humidity constant. Further, it is an argument that temperature is sufficient to represent the influence of climate change. It is not an argument making the case that focusing solely on the impact of climate change is more useful than an expansive assessment that includes other non-climate factors.

Page 23 of the peer review document,

“Line 73 – It is worth mentioning that fuels including both fuel types, structure, and amount were held constant in addition to fuel moisture.”

The reviewer asks for us to state that fuel characteristics are held constant at a particular place in the manuscript (even though that is already stated in other places).

Page 26 of the peer review document,

“Lastly, area burned is influenced by many variables and I think that fire management effort is one that deserves some mention. Fire management effectiveness varies due to a number of factors, but fire load/resource availability is a key factor that could confound your results.”

The reviewer is expressing concern that fire management will make it more difficult for us to quantify the influence of temperature on wildfire growth in our historical dataset (a relationship we can then use later for our climate change projections). We address this by inserting a caveat.

Reviewers did not challenge the usefulness of focusing solely on the impact of climate change when calculating long-term changes in wildfire behavior in any of these discussions. Rather, they are focused on making sure the methodology is able to get an accurate quantification of the impact of climate change.

Wouldn’t accounting for these other non-climate factors in your wildfire projections make your paper better and help it get published in Nature?

A paper that appropriately accounted for projections in other relevant non-climate factors would probably be inconclusive in even the direction of future wildfire change with uncertainty ranges that overlap with zero. That research – which is more useful research – would tell a much less clean story and would be less likely to be a high-profile paper. This is the sense in which ‘leaving out the full truth’ (other relevant causal factors) made the paper more compelling, which then makes it more worthy of a high-profile venue. This “positive results bias,” where researchers are more likely to submit, and editors are more likely to accept, results that demonstrate a clear significant relationship over an inconclusive one, is a well-known phenomenon.

To conclude,

My aim is to highlight a problem and push for reform so that the incentives facing researchers are better aligned with what produces the most useful knowledge for society.

There are many reasonable reasons that climate researchers and journalists might disagree with my essay. Nature has published papers that push back against the narrow focus on climate impacts that I describe. I can’t say for certain that a paper focused more broadly on climate and non-climate factors would not have been published in Nature. And any criticism of climate science practice will assuredly be amplified by right-wing media eager to promote skepticism about climate change.

But the specific claims above, which have been widely repeated and have constituted much of the effort to ignore the issues I have raised, are false and misleading.

More broadly, I’d like to push for changes in attitudes and norms from researchers to institutions to journals and the media. My main thrust is simply that research on climate and society should not have such an inordinate focus on identifying and highlighting negative climate impacts at the expense of studying the effectiveness of solutions that can help people today. I am interested in hearing ideas and forming networks of people who would also like to see reform in this direction, and I hope, perhaps unrealistically, that those determined to loudly discredit the concerns I have raised will consider whether doing so, over the long term, really serves the credibility of the climate science enterprise.

Appendix: Responses to Some Additional Questions I Have Received.

Are you happy that your piece was used by people who think climate change isn’t real or is not caused by humans?

No.

I think it goes without saying that climate change is real and that the evidence is overwhelming that humans have caused about 100% of the warming since the Industrial Revolution. Also, in order to stabilize the climate, we must reduce CO2 emissions to near zero in the long run. Furthermore, as I said in the editorial, warming has very important effects on increasing wildfire danger.

I do not wish to spread doubt on these facts, so I turned down many, many media requests that came from outlets that I thought wanted me to question the fundamentals of climate science.

But I also think that the climate science community is overly concerned about “giving ammunition” to the “bad side” who are not fully on board with, e.g., net-zero by 2050 policies. That concern is biasing the literature. I have seen this several times where a reviewer of a paper says something to the effect of “the authors should be very careful how this result is presented so that it cannot be used by climate deniers.” As scientists, we cannot be so careful to mold our results so that they support a message or our science will lose its credibility.

In your title, you said you “left out the full truth.” How so?

I did not choose the title, but I take 100% responsibility for it because I approved it. I regret that the title caused a lot of confusion. However, I do think it accurately communicates a main theme of my piece. The title was not meant to mean that there was anything explicitly untruthful about the paper itself – something that is made clear if you read the piece.

“The full truth” in this context, simply refers to the myriad of causal factors that affect wildfire behavior (e.g., non-climate factors like human ignition patterns and fuel loads) and could be altered in the future to mitigate wildfire danger. My methodology left those out when it came to projecting changes in wildfire behavior over time. The paper is honest about leaving those factors out, so there is nothing explicitly wrong with the paper itself. However, at the end of the day, what gets communicated to the public is just part of the story and not the full truth. My claim is that high-profile papers that do the same type of thing are very common, and so the public and decision-makers are often left without the full truth.

Why did you say “As a scientist, I’m not allowed to tell the full truth about climate change”?

I did not say that. The New York Post made that up.

Hasn’t Nature published other papers that go against the narrative you describe?

Yes. My claim is not that there are no exceptions to the type of paper I am describing. My claim is that following the strategy I outline represents a particularly easy path to publication.

This is informed by my many years of experience reading high-impact journals, reviewing for them, submitting to them, and publishing in them. The elements I identify of focusing narrowly on a negative climate change impact and using unrealistic future warming scenarios are very common in the output from high-impact journals, especially those covered the most by the media (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017). That media coverage gets the papers not only in front of decision-makers but other scientists, who are then more likely to cite the work and shape their own work in a similar way. The general practices of straining to highlight negative climate impacts within data that paint an overall positive picture, and overemphasizing unrealistically high future warming scenarios are then adopted in authoritative assessment reports of the literature and coverage of those reports, all reinforcing a positive feedback loop.

How did Nature respond to the accusation of having a preferred Narrative?

To me, a reasonable dismissal of my criticism would be to say something to the effect of “Yes, the assessment of scientific research is done by people, and people have conscious and unconscious preferences that affect that assessment. This is an issue that philosophers have grappled with for centuries and is hardly anything novel”.

Instead, they doubled down on the façade of pristine objectivity, saying, “When it comes to science, Nature does not have a preferred narrative.”

But what about your coauthors? Was it fair to them to call into question research that they contributed to?

I was 100% responsible for molding the presentation of the research in a way that I thought would be palatable to a high-profile venue, so my critique is only on my own actions, not those of my co-authors.

I knew my editorial would be controversial and generate discussion, but I did not anticipate the level of negative coverage it would get. It was not fair of me to subject my coauthors to the firestorm, I regret that quite a lot, and I am very sorry to them.

Do you have ideas for reform?

Identifying a problem is much easier than identifying a concrete solution. But I’d like to work on concrete solutions much more going forward. These solutions range from being more technical, at the level of the journal, to being more broad at a cultural level.

At the level of journals, I think something that would help would be more widespread adoption of preregistering methodologies – preferably resembling hypothesis tests. This would help reduce the ‘file drawer effect, where only the flashiest results make it to publication and subsequent promotion in the media.

At the level of synthesis and dissemination of the state of climate change, I think the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual State of the Climate Report is a good model because it reports the state of virtually all relevant climate variables in a systematic, consistent way without an effort to seek out and highlighting only the most dramatic changes.

More broadly, I am pushing for changes in attitudes and norms from researchers to institutions to journals and the media. My main thrust is simply that research on climate and society should not have such an inordinate focus on identifying and highlighting negative climate impacts at the expense of studying the effectiveness of solutions that can help people today.  I am interested in hearing ideas and forming networks of people who would also like to see reform in this direction.

There is a formula for publishing climate change impacts research in the most prestigious and widely-read scientific journals. Following it brings professional success, but it comes at a cost to society.

This is a version of a piece that is published in The Free Press.

This month, I published a lead-author research paper in Nature on changes in extreme wildfire behavior under climate change. Because Nature is one of the world’s most prestigious and visible scientific journals, getting published there is highly competitive, and it can significantly advance a researcher’s career. 

This is my third publication in Nature to go along with another in Nature’s climate-focused journal Nature Climate Change. I have also served as an expert peer reviewer for both journals as well as Nature Communications and Nature Geoscience. Through this experience, as well as through various failures to get research published in these journals, I have learned that there is a formula for success which I enumerate below in a four-item checklist. Unfortunately, the formula is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society.

In order for scientific research to be as useful as possible, it should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, commitment to uncovering the truth, and practicality. However, scientific research is carried out by people, and people tend to subconsciously prioritize more immediate personal goals tied to meaning, status, and professional advancement. Aligning the personal incentives that researchers face with the production of the most valuable information for society is critical for the public to get what it deserves from the research that they largely fund, but the current reality falls far short of this ideal.

Many will have heard the phrase “publish or perish” in relation to academic research. It is a simple truth that, at bottom, research is a social endeavor: if you do not communicate what you have done to your colleagues, your funders, and the public, it is the same as not having done the work at all. The way that research is communicated is by publishing it in academic peer-reviewed journals, but which journals you publish in makes a huge difference.

A researcher’s career depends on their work being widely known and perceived as important. This begins the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring Ph.D. students and postdocs, and of course, accolades. But as the number of researchers and the volume of research has skyrocketed in recent years, it has become more competitive than ever to stand out in the crowd. Thus, while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in the most high-profile scientific journals – namely Nature and its rival Science – this has never been more true.

Given then that the editors at Nature and Science serve as gatekeepers for career success in academic research, their preferences exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a much larger pool of what is submitted, but in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly because savvy researchers will tailor their studies to maximize their likelihood of being accepted. I know because I am one of those savvy researchers.

My overarching advice for getting climate change impacts research published in a high-profile journal is to make sure that it supports the mainstream narrative that climate change impacts are pervasive and catastrophic, and the primary way to deal with them is not through practical adaptation measures but through policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, the paper should try to check at least four boxes.

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.

In my recent Nature paper, we focused on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior but did not bother to quantify the influence of other obviously relevant factors like changes in human ignitions or the effect of poor forest management. I knew that considering these factors would make for a more realistic and useful analysis, but I also knew that it would muddy the waters and thus make the research more difficult to publish.

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.

This brings me to the second component of the formula, which is to ignore or at least downplay near-term practical actions that can negate the impact of climate change. If deaths related to outdoor temperatures are decreasing and agricultural yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. It is then valuable to study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it. However, there is a strong taboo against studying or even mentioning successes since they are thought to undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. Identifying and focusing on problems rather than studying the effectiveness of solutions makes for more compelling abstracts that can be turned into headlines, but it is a major reason why high-profile research is not as useful to society as it could be.

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 rather are specifically designed to generate impressive numbers. In the case of our paper, we followed the common convention of focusing on changes in the risk of extreme wildfire events rather than simpler and more intuitive metrics like changes in the amount of acres burned. The sacrifice of clarity for the sake of more impressive numbers was probably necessary for it to get into Nature. 

Another related convention, which we also followed in our paper, is to report results corresponding to time periods that are not necessarily relevant to society but, again, get you the large numbers that justify the importance of your research. For example, it is standard practice to report societal climate change impacts associated with how much warming has occurred since the industrial revolution but to ignore or “hold constant” societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes have been much larger than climate changes since the 1800s. Similarly, it is conventional to report projections associated with distant future warming scenarios now thought to be implausible while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience.

A much more useful analysis for informing adaptation decisions would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced to the foreseeable future – the next several decades – while accounting for changes in technology and resilience. In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with proposed reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades (research we are conducting now). This more practical kind of analysis is discouraged, however, because looking at changes in impacts over shorter time periods and in the context of other relevant factors reduces the calculated magnitude of the impact of climate change, and thus it appears to weaken the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. 

The final and perhaps most insidious element of producing a high-profile scientific research paper has to do with the clean, concise format of the presentation. These papers are required to be short, with only a few graphics, and thus there is little room for discussion of complicating factors or contradictory evidence. Furthermore, such discussions will weaken the argument that the findings deserve the high-profile venue. This incentivizes researchers to assemble and promote only the strongest evidence in favor of the case they are making. The data may be messy and contradictory, but that messiness has to be downplayed and the data shoehorned into a neat compelling story. This encouragement of confirmation bias is, of course, completely contradictory to the spirit of objective truth-seeking that many imagine animates the scientific enterprise.

All this is not to say that I think my recent Nature paper is useless. On the contrary, I do think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for a high-profile journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been. I am now conducting the version of this research that I believe adds much more practical value for real-world decisions. This entails using more straightforward metrics over more relevant timeframes to quantify the impact of climate change on wildfire behavior in the context of other important influences like changes in human ignition patterns and changes in forest management practices.

But why did I follow the 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. When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula I outlined here, my papers were promptly rejected out of hand by the editors of high-profile journals without even going to peer review. Thus, I sacrificed value added for society in order to for the research to be compatible with the preferred narratives of the editors.

I have now transitioned out of a tenure-track academic position, and I feel liberated to direct my research toward questions that I think are more useful for society, even if they won’t make for clean stories that are published in high-profile venues. Stepping outside of the academy also removes the reservations I had to call out the perverse incentives facing scientific researchers because I no longer have to worry about the possibility of burning bridges and ruining my chances of ever publishing in a Nature journal again.

So what can shift the research landscape towards a more honest and useful treatment of climate change impacts? A good place to start would be for the editors of high-profile scientific journals to widen the scope of what is eligible for their stamp of approval and embrace their ostensible policies that encourage out-of-the-box thinking that challenges conventional wisdom. If they can open the door to research that places the impacts of climate change in the appropriate context, uses the most relevant metrics, gives serious treatment to societal changes in resilience, and is more honest about contradictory evidence, a wider array of valuable research will be published, and the career goals of researchers will be better aligned with the production of the most useful decision support for society.

We have a paper out on a field of increasing importance in meteorology: The analysis of synoptic-scale extreme reductions in wind and solar power energy resources (i.e., wind and solar “droughts”).

If you like talks more than papers here is a talk I gave to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the research.

More details are below but first, some background: Two broad trends make it so that our society’s energy consumption is being impacted progressively more by the weather: 1) Increasingly more and more of society’s energy consumption is coming via electricity (e.g., the electrification of transportation and water/space heating). 2) Increasingly more and more of that electricity is being generated from weather-dependent resources like wind and solar power.

Thus, as wind and solar power resources become more indispensable for society, a full scientific understanding of their droughts may approach the importance of understanding droughts in other resources like precipitation.

This concern has inspired a lot of work on the general topic of the (co)variability of wind and solar power resources but less work has been done on the atmospheric circulation patterns responsible for generating synoptic-scale reductions in wind and solar power resources, both independent of each other and in conjunction.

These extreme weather events have been occurring ‘under the radar’ since the dawn of meteorology but they have not received significant scientific attention because of their historical lack of impact. However, this situation is now rapidly changing as market forces and legal mandates increase the penetration of wind and solar power generation in electricity grids around the world.

This is exemplified in the recent situation in Europe where electricity prices spiked in part because of reduced wind power supply.

In our study, we focus on the meteorological causes of these extreme events over a case study region of western North America with an emphasis on synoptic-scale atmospheric circulations.

We found that perhaps not surprisingly, wind droughts are typically associated with high-pressure systems and solar droughts are typically associated with low-pressure systems and thus wind and solar resources should be anti-correlated at synoptic weather scales.

This along with the fact that wind and solar resources are anticorrelated at the seasonal timescale supports the notion that including both wind and solar power in an energy resource portfolio reduces risk in the same way that diversifying a stock portfolio does.

More specifically, wind drought events over the western US were associated with a thermal mid-level ridge (warm-core high) centered over British Columbia & solar drought events were associated with a thermal mid-level trough (cold core low) off of the west coast of North America.

Furthermore, we found that the synoptic-dynamic meteorology of these phenomena was interpretable through classic Quasi-Geostrophic Theory. This is evidence that these droughts are manifestations of well-known and well-understood weather patterns and are not the result of some unexpected or exotic mechanism. That hopefully means that wind and solar droughts should be as forecastable as any synoptic weather phenomena on daily to seasonal timescales and it suggests that they should be represented reasonably well by courser resolution climate models.

We also find some indication that both wind droughts and solar droughts are slightly associated with positive El Niño and/or positive PDO situations, especially in their most extreme manifestations (Supp Fig. 17 j,k,l).

Finally, this research also supports the notion that there is value in pooling renewable energy resources over areas large enough to encompass the full wavelength of typical Rossby Waves which implies that, in the US, there are significant benefits in moving towards a continental scale “super grid” connected by high voltage transmission.

For more on this research topic see here: https://weatherclimatehumansystems.org/research If you are interested in collaborating on research along these lines please feel free to contact me!

A few people asked me about the accuracy of a recent NY Times Magazine / NY Times Daily Podcast story “How Climate Migration Will Reshape America”. It contains plenty of interesting discussion on e.g., property insurance under a changing climate but it is very loose with the facts on current climate change in the US and it continuously errs on the side of hyperbole and exaggeration.

Below I take a look at observational data corresponding to some of the claims in the article. Overall, I think the data gives a very different impression of the state of climate change in the US than does the rhetoric in the piece.

This is important because this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of the NY Times / NY Times Daily Podcast at a time when people really need journalism they can trust.

Furthermore, the issue of human migration under climate change is important and thus it needs to be covered in a serious and fact-based way. We cannot afford for this kind of sloppiness to give people an excuse to dismiss the entire premise.

Most of this piece’s claims are about the future. It is difficult to fact-check claims about the future so I will just look at a few claims that can be easily put in context against historical observational data.

Claim: “August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations.”

Context on CA heat: August 2020 was the fourth hottest month on record in California. It’s average temperature was 79°F. Not as hot as July 2018 (79.6°F), July 2006 (79.3°F), or July 1931 (79.5°F). So it was hot but not “unseen in generations”.

Claim: “I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation”

Context on fires: The nation has not seen more fires through August but when September numbers are tallied this will indeed go up and likely will set a record. Though it is important to note that there is not an obvious nationwide long-term trend in wildfires.

More context on fires: It is perhaps worth mentioning that global annual area-burned has decreased over the past 20 years. This illustrates that, thus far, climate is not a first-order influence on area-burned and its influence can be totally overwhelmed by other factors. https://www.weatherclimatehumansystems.org/faq-on-fires-humans-and-global-change

Context on US heat: It is true that this summer was hot in the US. It was the 4^th warmest on record behind 2011, 2012 and 1936.

More context on heat: Rather than looking at summer means, we can look at indices that measure attributes of heatwaves like the “Warm Spell Duration Index”. Here’s what that looks like for the US. The 1920s and 1930s had higher values that what we have seen recently.

Context on storms: It is not clear what is meant by storms. But maximum 1-day precipitation might be a pretty good proxy for what most people think of as storms. There have been increases in this metric over recent decades but we are not at a historical maxima:

More context on storms: The author could also be referring to tropical storms. Below is a measure of tropical storms making landfall in the United States. We can see some increase in recent decades.

Claim: “Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West…”

Context on droughts: The brown bars are the area in the US that are much more arid than normal. The US West has indeed seen bad droughts in the 2000s and 2010s. More on crops below.

More context on droughts: It is worth noting that we do not see long-term trends in droughts over the US overall.

Claim: “while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland”

Context on floods: Here is the long-term change in an index of maximum 5-day precipitation. While not a direct measure of floods, this can be thought of as a rough proxy. By this measure, we are not currently at a historical maxima.

Claim: “Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable.”

Context on rising seas: Global sea levels have risen about 3 inches since the mid 1990s. This will be a major problem as it continues but does 3 inches plus the change in tropical cyclones shown above amount to “thousands of miles of shoreline nearly uninhabitable”? Sorry, it does not.

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

Claim: “Let’s start with some basics. Across the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Ariz., does today”

Context: This is absolutely false. The average daily high temperature in July in Buffalo NY is near 79°F. The average daily high temperature in July in Tempe Arizona is near 106°F. That’s a 27°F difference.

Buffalo is projected to warm by roughly 2.3°F under a medium emissions scenario by 2050 (and by 5°F by 2100). So that would mean that the author claimed a warming of something like 27°F “in a few decades” when our best estimate is something closer to 10% of that.

Claim: “The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming.”

Context on crop yields: Historically it has warmed and crop yields have only increased. For one thing, there has been little detrimental climate stress on US crops so far, as measured by indices like the Crop Moisture Stress Index:

Further Context on crop yields: Yields of corn and other crops have only increased globally because changes in technology and agricultural practices have vastly outweighed any negative impact from climate. https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields

Claim: “It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year”.

Context on CA autumn winds: The most infamous fire-enhancing autumn winds in CA are the “Santa Ana winds”. They are not increasing every year and projections suggest that their occurrence will be less frequent not more frequent under climate change.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GL080261

Claim: “The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy overall could contract by 10 percent.”

Context: This is a 10% contraction relative to a no-climate change scenario not 10% contraction relative to today. That distinction makes a huge difference. It means that the projection says that if GDP were to increase by 100% without climate change over the next 80 years (very conservative estimate) then climate change would cause GDP to “only” increase by 90%.

Claim: “Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable…”

Context: I am sorry but this is just not reconcilable with the data above.

I could go on with other claims made in this piece but I’ll stop here for now. You should get the idea. It paints a picture of current climate change in the US that is very different than the story that is told from looking at the actual observational data and all the errors are in the direction of overstating the negative impact on the US today.

The editors at NY Times Magazine / The Daily Podcast must think that being cavalier with the facts is OK because ‘sending the right message’ on climate change is more important than accuracy. I could not disagree more.

At a time when trust in institutions like the New York Times is faltering, and the right calls them fake news – they cannot afford to confirm that narrative. It makes it too easy for those who want to be dismissive of climate change to feel vindicated in that belief.

Plots above are mostly from: https://ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/ and https://climdex.org/access/

Lecture on tipping points in the climate system from my frosh, general education level Global Warming course.

My talk on this research at the American Meteorological Society’s Annual Meeting.

PTBrown_AGU_2019_Poster

AGU E-Poster

PTBrown_AGU_2018_Poster