This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Moral Hazards, a weeklong exploration of the complex — sometimes contradictory — factors that drive our ethical decision-making in the age of global warming. When a climate scientist’s inbox is flooded with requests to appear on Fox News, it’s a fairly clear sign they’ve done something controversial. For Patrick Brown, the moment arrived a year ago, mere hours after his essay titled “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” landed on the internet.
“I’m reaching out to invite you to our show tomorrow to discuss how the media’s obsession with global warming manipulates the truth about wildfires,” a booking producer for the morning show Fox & Friends First wrote to Brown on September 5, 2023, proposing a five-minute video interview at 5:20 a.m. the next day. Brown was torn. Here was a chance, his wife urged him, to reach a new, national audience with his message: that “climate change is real and is important, but it’s not everything.” (It was an audience that would be, for a change, skeptical about the first half of that statement instead of the second.)
Yet Brown was overwhelmed by the attention his piece was drawing and worried he wouldn’t be able to redirect the conversation away from anti-science talking points in such a short interview. “I felt like I would become too bullied into making this argument that climate change is all a hoax,” he said.
The drama had been set in motion one week earlier, when Nature, arguably the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, published a study Brown co-authored showing that climate change had increased the risk of explosive wildfires in California by 25 percent. When the paper came out at the end of August, colleagues congratulated him, and the research was covered by NPR, The Los Angeles Times, and other media outlets. “You’re treated like this just very, very important person, with super interesting things to say,” Brown said. “‘Thank you so much, Dr. Brown’ — you know, that type of thing.”
Then, a week later, Brown shocked many of his colleagues by criticizing his own study in his essay in The Free Press, an outlet that seeks to cover news stories “that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative.” Brown wrote that he had tailored the wildfire study to fit what high-impact journals seemed to want, with a single-minded focus on communicating the disastrous consequences of climate change. “The editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives,” he wrote. This instinct, he said, came at the expense of more complex, solutions-oriented studies about, say, managing forests to reduce the risk of extreme fires. He stood by his study’s finding that global warming contributes to wildfires — “Make no mistake: That influence is very real,” he wrote — but argued that its narrow focus was part of a broader problem. “To put it bluntly,” he wrote, “climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Brown declined the Fox News interviews, but that didn’t stop many right-wing news outlets from seizing on the idea that scientists were somehow messing with climate data. “Climate change expert overhyped his findings,” read one headline, on the front page of the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, left-of-center news sources quickly passed the mic to Brown’s detractors. “Fact check: Scientists pour cold water on claims of ‘journal bias’ by author of wildfires study,” read the headline on the website Carbon Brief. For several days, anyone who followed the conversation about climate change on X, formerly Twitter, couldn’t open the app without coming across attacks on Brown.
“The really sort of pitchfork reaction to Patrick’s essay took him by surprise,” said Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the think tank The Breakthrough Institute, where Brown co-directs the climate and energy team. Headlines show reactions from the press following the publication of Brown’s essay. Grist Although science clearly demonstrates that climate change is real and worsening, there’s still a muddiness around exactly how much it drives the floods, fires, and other impacts seen around the world today, compared to other factors. Covering cities in impermeable pavement, or stifling fires and letting forests overgrow, plays a role in how bad these disasters become. In blog posts, talks, and on social media, Brown examines these murky details, calling out oversimplification when he sees it, even if doing so might distract from what many colleagues see as the central task of stabilizing the Earth’s climate. Brown’s choice — to embrace the gray over the green, so to speak — doesn’t make him popular with those who see a moral imperative to ditch fossil fuels as fast as possible. From their perspective, you could make the case that Brown is a disgruntled academic who’s undermining the public will to reduce emissions by alleging there’s bias in climate science and challenging the focus on catastrophe. From another, you could argue that he’s on a mission to make science more honest, informing the public about how humans might adapt to a hotter planet. So is Brown a villain, a hero, or something more complicated?
The villain The way a person characterizes the commotion that followed Brown’s essay starts with what to call it. The climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, for example, suggested it could be called “a series of unfortunate events,” a nod to the children’s books by Lemony Snicket. Sitting next to Brown at dinner during a Breakthrough Institute conference in June, I fumbled for words to ask a question about “the Nature incident.”
“We call it ‘the hullabaloo,’” Brown replied with a half-cocked smile.
At some point, in my head, I dubbed it “the Brown affair,” a reference to an episode from 1996, in which the physicist Alan Sokal submitted “an article liberally salted with nonsense” to a cultural studies journal. Sokal’s paper suggested that physical reality was “a social and linguistic construct” and put forth a bizarre theory about quantum gravity, claiming that it provided “powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.” Sokal bet correctly that the journal would publish his word salad if “a) it sounded good and b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
An article about the Sokal affair appeared on the front page of the New York Times on May 18, 1996. The New York Times Archives Sokal revealed the hoax in an essay in the magazine Lingua Franca a few weeks after the article was published, explaining that his intention was to highlight “sloppy thinking” among the academic left, who he thought were drifting away from objective reality. Sokal’s hoax made the front page of The New York Times and traveled as far as Le Monde in France, and decades later, the ethics of his experiment are still being debated. “In retrospect, I now see that I underestimated the interest of the general public in intellectual questions,” Sokal reflected in the 2008 book Beyond the Hoax.
This is the version of Brown, the villain: a Sokal 2.0, a prankster with suspicious ethics who’s providing fuel for oil companies, the far right, and the rest of the climate disinformation machine. It’s a comparison made by Max Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, who teaches the Sokal affair in his classes. Brown “deliberately appeared to have used some of the systems that we use in good faith — of peer review, of publishing — and manipulated that system,” Boykoff said.
One of Brown’s coauthors said he was blindsided by the about-face. “Patrick’s critique of our paper came as a surprise to me, and I don’t share his cynicism regarding Nature’s editorial bias,” Steven J. Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University, wrote in an email. Unlike Sokal, Brown says he didn’t make a premeditated decision to try to undermine a journal’s credibility. He decided to write the essay in June…
