A climate scientist questioned his findings. It didn’t go well.

In late August of last year, a climate scientist named Patrick Brown, along with seven co-authors, published a study in the journal Nature about the connections between wildfires in California and global warming.

Their paper was, in many ways, standard fare for the prestigious journal. It took a deep dive into environmental measurements; it used machine learning and evaluated complex climatic comparisons; it concluded that climate change was making wildfires more extreme.

It was also, Dr. Brown claimed publicly just a month later, untrustworthy.

Dr. Brown confessed in a Free Press article that he had framed his research not just to reflect the truth, but to fit within what he described as the climate alarmist storyline preferred by prestigious journals in the United States. He did this, he says, by intentionally focusing only on climate as a factor in wildfires, and not on the myriad other causes that contribute to the blazes consuming ever more land across the country.

It wasn’t that he was hiding anything, or that the research was wrong. It was just that the paper was deliberately focused in one narrow direction – the direction most likely, he claimed, to capture the attention of journal editors.

The formula for getting published, he wrote, “is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society.” And when it comes to climate science, he alleged, that preapproved narrative is that “climate change impacts are pervasive and catastrophic.”

Almost immediately, people who questioned the reality of climate change began citing Dr. Brown’s essay as “proof” that global warming is a hoax, perpetrated by academics consumed by a “woke” agenda. 

The reaction was also swift within his field. The editors of Nature denied any bias and said that Dr. Brown had “poor research practices” and was “highly irresponsible.” They pointed to a number of articles that seemed to go against Dr. Brown’s assertions. And climate advocates skewered Dr. Brown as being everything from unhinged to unethical. His words, they said, would bolster what watchdog groups say is a new wave of climate denialism. 

“We’ll be hearing echoes of Brown’s impulsively emotional blurt for a very long time,” wrote Doug Bostrom on the website Skeptical Science, which was created to debunk climate misinformation. “Brown has caused durable material harm to climate progress. It’s to no good end.”

But privately, Dr. Brown insists, fellow researchers have expressed sympathy. He was never questioning the reality of climate change itself, he says, or its importance. Neither was he making up data or violating academic standards – nothing about his paper, he points out, has required a retraction. He was just pointing out a place where he saw the scientific community not living up to science’s own ideals. 

Dr. Brown, co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute, a research center in Berkeley, California, has long been fascinated by the way research transforms into widespread knowledge. How does the stew of individuals and institutions and media each combine in various ways to form popular understandings?

He and his co-authors had decided to focus on the real impacts of climate factors on wildfires. But they had also decided to not focus on some of the other factors that have equally real impacts. These include land-use choices and varying forest management policies. 

Their findings were sound. But as he reflected on this work, Dr. Brown says, he had to admit that he chose to focus on climate instead of other factors because he believed that’s what would make his study more likely to be published.

He thought it was only fair for him to delve into his own decision-making process as part of an honest, and important, critique of the culture within his field.

“I think there is a certain section of the population that has way too little trust in climate science, and then a section that has too much trust in a perception of what climate science is, that it’s this all-encompassing thing that tells global society what to do,” he says. 

A more nuanced stance, however, can be difficult to maintain in today’s crisis-driven world of climate science.

Indeed, this is a field where researchers face increasing attacks from politicians, organizations funded by the fossil fuel industry, and social media trolls. In other words, tension is high, and, many believe, the stakes are even higher.

“Deniers and skeptics say climate scientists are alarmist. We are not alarmist enough,” says Astrid Caldas, senior scientist for community resilience at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If we could, we would scream to the four winds and say, ‘People, wake up! Things are not looking good.’”

But if climate science doesn’t make space for alternative viewpoints, it risks its foundational ideals of open inquiry and debate and rigorous, evidence-based critiques, some analysts say. And while there is an important distinction between asking honest, skeptical questions and purveying false narratives, it’s not always crystal clear where that line lies.

Questioning mainstream assumptions about climate change without denying its import or reality – “threading the needle,” as Dr. Brown puts it – can be a much-maligned path.

“I don’t think he was prepared for the anger and vitriol,” says Roger Pielke Jr., professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Pielke has been labeled a climate change denier himself – a characterization he vehemently rejects. “He didn’t say anything wrong. All of us think about, how do we construct our papers so we have the best chance of getting published? The climate space is no different.”

The role of uncertainty in climate science

Except, many scientists insist, it is different.

There are few scientific topics so complicated, with so many potential impacts on humanity, as climate change. And there are few areas of science that have been so undermined.

Science historians often point to the late 1800s as the moment when researchers began recognizing that the Earth was warmer than it should be, and when they began connecting this to carbon dioxide, one of the main gases that trap heat within the atmosphere. 

Since then, scientists have repeatedly measured and analyzed the Earth’s rising temperatures, as well as the impact of increasing greenhouse gases, and in particular CO₂ , which is released when humans burn fossil fuels. They have found, with increasing precision and surety, that the emissions of the modern world have indeed heated the Earth.

This is a point worth emphasizing, since this is as close to fact as one often gets in science. We know the Earth is getting hotter. We know human activity has played a significant role.

“It has as solid evidence as gravity,” says Benjamin Houlton, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. There are valid scientific debates about the consequences of this heating, he says. “The uncertainty is pretty significant; there’s nothing settled about the future” – but only a scattered handful of outliers still argues against the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming.

Still, those skeptics have had an outsize impact on Americans’ trust in climate science. And that may be intentional, some argue.

In their widely acclaimed 2010 book, “Merchants of Doubt,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway detail how a small group of scientists denied connections between smoking and lung cancer, sulfur dioxide and acid rain, and aerosols and ozone damage. Their goal was often to slow down government regulation. Today, some of these same scientists have been connected to climate denial movements funded by intensely free-market, anti-environmentalist organizations.

The partisanship around global warming has eased some in recent years. More than half of younger Republicans say the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change, according to the Pew Research Center. But the difference between Republicans and Democrats is still stark. 

Gavin Schmidt is a NASA climate scientist who in 2021 served as the agency’s acting senior adviser on climate. He says that many of his colleagues were taken aback when partisanship crashed into their profession.

When he got his Ph.D. in the early 1990s, he recalls, the question of global warming was politically salient, but the scientists studying it were, well, scientists. They were individuals interested in the fascinating but seemingly esoteric qualities of clouds and dinosaurs, of ice cores and carbon. “It was a bit of a niche thing,” he says. He and his colleagues were happy to work in the lab and the field, focused on calculations and peer-reviewed journals. For the most part, they didn’t see public debate and policymaking as part of their world.

And then that started to change.

In 1995, a controversy exploded around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s second assessment report, which for the first time stated that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

Free market think tanks and policymakers, along with some scientists connected to these groups, accused climate modeler Ben Santer, a co-author of the report, of professional dishonesty, saying he skewed his research for political reasons, The allegations soon became personal and increasingly threatening. At one point the scientist found a dead rat left on his doorstep. It didn’t matter that Dr. Santer and his colleagues repeatedly debunked the accusations. The harassment still remained virulent.

In 1998, a scientist named Michael Mann published a graph in Nature magazine shaped like a hockey stick – illustrating the exponential heating of the Earth over the last century compared with the previous millennium. A few years later, Al Gore used that graph in his narration of the climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” 

Dr. Mann also began receiving death threats. Congressional leaders accused him of fraudulent research practices. In 2012, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, published a blog post comparing the investigation into Dr. Mann’s work to the investigation into former football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually abusing children. (Dr. Mann sued the bloggers for defamation. This year he won a judgment of $1 million.)

Climate change skeptics, occasionally funded by fossil fuel interests, began focusing their ire on other scientists as well. “I remember when I first started getting attacked and people started putting down lawsuits and [Freedom of Information Act] requests and insulting me in public,” Dr. Schmidt says. “That was a big shock.” 

In 2011, a group of climate-conscious entrepreneurs, legal scholars, and scientists decided to fight back, creating the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to protect climate scientists from threats and censorship.

Today, that group is busier than ever, says Lauren Kurtz, its executive director. Her team of lawyers is defending scientists who say they have faced governmental backlash for their research, or who have been disciplined by academic departments for speaking publicly about what they see as the harms of climate change. Sometimes, online abuse of climate scientists has expanded into real-world intimidation, says Ms. Kurtz, who has passed along information to police departments.

It is in this world that Dr. Brown wrote his article.

“On a fundamental level, some amount of skepticism is appropriate, wanted, in science,” she says. “You want scientists to look at each other’s research and try to pull it apart; you want people to double-check and triple-check it, re-create it. ... At the same time, I think that approach has been weaponized by people who want to dispute the scientific reality of climate change, sometimes from a very disingenuous perspective.”

From honest critique to hoax

This is where it gets tricky. Because what’s disingenuous to one person can be an honest critique to another. And the newest wave of climate disinformation has helped undermine the trust needed to decipher between the two. 

A decade ago, the primary claim by climate skeptics was that the Earth is not actually warming. Some still take this line. For instance, a documentary released this spring called “Climate: The Movie” calls global warming a hoax. 

Yet for the most part, the denialist arguments have shifted. In January, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report on what it described as a movement from “Old Denial” to “New Denial.” After analyzing thousands of hours of social media content, for example, researchers found that 70% of denial material on YouTube focused either on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, or on attacking the integrity of climate scientists and their research.

“People who want to stop action on climate change have changed their strategy from denying that climate change is real or man-made, to saying that it is real but there is no hope, that the solutions don’t work or the scientists themselves don’t really understand it. None of which is true,” says the group’s CEO, Imran Ahmed. “It shows their cynicism, in that they’ve pivoted so easily from claiming that climate change is fake to, ‘Climate change is real, but there’s no way to fix it,’” he says.

Many researchers say this sort of denialism has been effective. Nearly 80% of Americans say they trust medical scientists, and around 75% say the same for scientists in general, according to the Pew Research Center. But only a third of Americans think climate scientists understand “very well” whether climate change is happening. Only a quarter say climate scientists really understand the effects of climate change on extreme weather events, or know what we should do about it.

“We’re crashing on the rocks of disinformation,” says Brenda Ekwurzel, climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But the notion of “disinformation,” like any idea, can be debatable. Dr. Pielke, for example, is listed on the Skeptical Science website as a spreader of disinformation. Except, he says, he’s not. His career is entirely within “the establishment,” he says.

Dr. Pielke began his career as “one of the many nerds” at the National Center for Atmospheric Research before joining the faculty at the University of Colorado in 2001. His Ph.D. dissertation explored the importance of climate science in public policy. In the early 2000s, he wrote papers urging a broader description of climate change, more in line with that proposed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which still cites his work, to enable effective government responses. He votes Democratic and says he has deep concerns about the way humans are changing the Earth’s energy balance.

But Dr. Pielke argues that many of the widely cited cost estimates connecting weather disasters to climate change are mistaken. (Climate advocates regularly assert that climate change is costing the U.S. billions of dollars every year.) His research, he says, shows that extreme weather appears costlier because properties are more valuable. In other words, wealth increase is the real story. He regularly takes issue with media portrayals of extreme weather, and with what he sees as a knee-jerk reaction that connects every wildfire, flood, or hurricane to climate change. The reality is more complex, he says.

He also argues against some of the ways scientists estimate the future impacts of climate change, saying they are unrealistic and extreme. All of this puts him in the “climate change isn’t so bad” misinformation category, according to some groups.

“All you have to do is increase the uncertainty, make these claims, and you delay action,” says Dr. Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

But to Dr. Pielke, it just makes him a scientist. He stands by his research and has faced his own sort of harassment. A congressional investigation probed whether his work was secretly funded by fossil fuel interests. (The investigation cleared him of this charge.)

“I’m still establishment,” he says. “I’m one of the few people in the world whose peer-reviewed research is in three working groups of the IPCC. I didn’t leave the mainstream. The mainstream left me.”

“The best way of gaining trust is to be trustworthy”

Most people within the climate field agree that the dynamics of science have shifted in recent years. An increasing number of younger people have come into the field to “make a difference.” Older scientists, meanwhile, worry that their inability to effectively communicate the seriousness of their findings was partly why policymakers have not taken dramatic action on climate change.

Both of these factors compelled more scientists to engage in advocacy. But this hasn’t necessarily been advocacy in a purely political sense. Most of the scientists interviewed for this article view the Earth’s warming with great alarm. They and others are simply trying to get across the urgency of their work.

Yet political leanings do come through. Scientists, along with most academics, are more politically liberal than the country as a whole, according to recent studies about political donations. And this, some researchers say, has helped undermine trust in science among those who lean Republican.

Matthew Burgess, a self-proclaimed “moderate Canadian” and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says the politics he noticed within academia prompted him to study polarization around climate change – and to look for common ground.

“It felt like the conversations in the hallways were about how we need to change all of society over decades. But the only ones who were trusted or who could do anything about it were the left-most third of the Democratic Party,” he says. “That’s a dumb theory of change.”

He decided to do outreach on college campuses about polarized climate discussions. He says he spoke with conservatives and progressives and everyone in between, finding eager audiences among each and a willingness to be open – that is, to trust.

“Scientists sometimes overcomplicate the problem of being trusted,” he says. “The best way of gaining trust is to be trustworthy.”

That means acknowledging the downsides of climate action, he says. It means acknowledging where scientific expertise ends and personal, subjective opinion begins. It means acknowledging the big, ethical questions that come along with it. For instance, is it fair to prevent lower-income countries from developing the same fossil fuel-based energy systems that helped make the U.S. and Europe rich?

It also means keeping partisanship and incivility off social media. “The worst thing to happen to climate scientists on Twitter was climate scientists on Twitter,” he says.

And it means better explaining how science actually works.

Science, many in the field point out, is an evolving body of knowledge. There are some physical findings that move toward fact – such as the world is getting warmer, and humans are a cause. Other assumptions  continue to change as researchers gather more information.

“Science is not ‘yes or no’ because science is constantly evolving,” says Dr. Caldas of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Take the pandemic, she says. “One of the best examples that we have of this is COVID, and how much the recommendations changed. ... ‘You don’t need to wear a mask.’ ‘You need to wear a mask.’ ‘There are N95s, and you need to wear those.’ ‘You need to do this.’ ‘You need to do that.’ It kept changing. Why? Because knowledge kept evolving.”

In the case of the Earth’s energy systems, evolving knowledge includes all sorts of scenarios about what will happen in the future. Scientists use complex computerized models, with billions of data points, to evaluate everything from ocean currents to the carbon sequestration within soil to the ripple-down impact of cleaner air or melting glaciers. They then make predictions about future climate impacts.

Much of the modeling has proved to be highly accurate. But there are still uncertainties when it comes to future projections.

“What can you predict with 100% accuracy?” asks Dr. Houlton, the Cornell dean. “The bar that is being placed on climate science is a bar that has been placed on nobody else in society. The future is, by definition, unknown. That can’t be the conversation. I don’t think any climate scientists can say how bad it is going to get.”

As a society, we calculate and act on risk all the time, he and others point out, whether it’s in military preparedness or in car insurance. In climate science, most researchers believe that the more the atmosphere warms, the greater the risk of negative impact. But that’s not a universal opinion. And we as humans are tempted by what we want to hear, including a rosy message that our
climate-altered future won’t be so bad after all, and our children and communities will cope just fine.

“The value judgments are tough,” Dr. Houlton says. “I have great colleagues who are ringing alarm bells. I have individuals I respect who say, ‘No, it’s not going to be so bad.’ I get both perspectives.”

The problem, he and others say, is that without trust, the conversation between these two sides can devolve.

“Trust is a foundational attitude,” says Brian Kennedy, a senior researcher at Pew who researched public confidence in various professions and institutions for years. That’s why he and others study it, he explains.

Indeed, says Dr. Brown at The Breakthrough Institute, trust was the purpose of his controversial critique of his own research.

“After saying what I said, the perception that I got was, ‘You are on the bad side; you are a bad person,’” he says. “That’s unfortunate because I am trying to thread the needle; I am trying to be in the middle and say what I think. ... It’s difficult because people like to be on teams. A lot of people see this as a good-team-versus-bad-team thing, and the goal is to defeat the bad team. We can do better.” 

Editor's note: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the relationship between the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and local police departments.