The Breakthrough Institute (BTI) is not the sort of organization we usually cover here, because the folks there are not exactly deniers … but they have long seemed pretty intent on generating fodder for deniers to attack climate advocates. Ever since they (rightfully) booted UFOlogist co-founder Michael Shellenberger, BTI has been trying to rehabilitate its image, moving away from being a reflexively contrarian hippie-punching, pro-nuclear energy, and methane gas lobbying group. The organization is instead attempting to be a respectable climate and energy think tank pushing for "ecomodernism," arguing that only it has figured out how to do environmentalism correctly. (Just don't ask them to cite any success stories in getting bipartisan climate policy passed.)
Last week, though, that PR effort came crashing down as the latest Breakthrough staffer sabotaged his own reputation, threw his co-authors under the bus, and proved BTI isn't helping get us any closer to meaningful and equitable climate policies.
It started with a peer-reviewed study co-authored by Breakthrough's climate and energy team Co-Director Patrick Brown, which looked at the role of climate change in wildfires. After publication, Brown announced in a Substack post that he'd done something unethical and used his own personal guilt as evidence that everyone else in the climate science sphere is to blame.
The Fox News headline does a great job summarizing Brown's tossing of his co-authors under the bus: “California scientist says he ‘left out the full truth’ to get climate change wildfire study published.” That "full truth" is that climate change isn't the only driver of fires, that other aspects play a role, and that arsonists are often the ones starting fires, not climate conditions.
But the actual full truth is that the study’s reviewers tried to get Brown and his co-authors to delve into the non-climate-related drivers of fires, but he pushed back to say they'd do that in a different paper. So his key claim (that scientists need to play up climate alarm and downplay other factors in order to survive the peer-review process) was immediately debunked by the revelation that the journal asked for exactly the content Brown claimed it wanted to ignore.
The editor-in-chief of Nature, Magdalena Skipper, pointed to multiple examples of studies Brown alleged couldn't get published, just from the last month, and told E&E News that “The only thing in Patrick Brown’s statements about the editorial processes in scholarly journals that we agree on is that science should not work through the efforts by which he published this article."
John Kennedy at the Diagram Monkey blog does a great job of providing the proper context, explaining that the only evidence Brown has for his allegation that climate science is biased "is his own naughtiness."
Indeed, Brown did something unethical and then tried to use his own wrongdoing to blame everyone else for misbehaving.