Patrick Brown, the co-director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California, has blown the whistle on an open secret about climate science: it’s biased in favour of alarmism.
Editors at prestigious journals seem to prefer publishing simplistic, negative news and speculation about climate change. “It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility,” wrote Brown. So, after learning this lesson the hard way when his nuanced papers were rejected, he adapted his latest to suit their apparent prejudices - and it was published. It's the green equivalent of the well-known media adage: If it bleeds, it leads.
Matt Ridley, writing in The Telegraph, agrees. He says: "We have known for years that distinguished scientists who think that global warming is a problem but not a 'crisis' get ostracised, cancelled or rejected by peer reviewers. Meanwhile, even the most trivial study that comes to an alarmist conclusion gets rushed into print and celebrated in the media. Junior scientists notice and tailor their texts accordingly."
Ridley has first hand experience, writing: "One of the biggest measurable impacts of increased carbon dioxide is global greening – the recent increase in green vegetation on the planet, equivalent to twice the area of the United States and counting. But as I discovered when I broke a story on this in 2015, pointing this out brings a hail of professorial hate down on your head. I was even singled out in a Boston University press release for daring to suggest that more green vegetation might not be bad news."
Brown says that “there is a taboo against studying or even mentioning successes since they are thought to undermine the motivation for greenhouse gas emissions reductions”.
So, there you have it. The good news is that the world is in better shape than we're being told.