Authors reply to questionable publicity

Patrick T. Brown, Craig B. Clements, Adam K. Kochanski, Steven J. Davis, Holt Hanley & Scott J. Strenfel

An opinion essay written by one of us (P.T.B.) in The Free Press (see go.nature.com/3szinod) [excerpt posted below], and other related external commentary, has been interpreted as calling into question the results of our study ‘Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California’ (P. T. Brown et al. Nature 621, 760–766; 2023). We would like to clarify that the essay was not intended to question any specific finding or conclusion reported in that study, but constitutes P.T.B’s subjective opinion on its broader utility. As co-authors of the study, none of the rest of us was aware of this perspective, nor do we share it.

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.

By Patrick T Brown
September 5, 2023

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer—from Canada to Europe to Maui—you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.

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I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

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