I don’t know why I felt so strongly about this as a child, but learning about the Hitler Youth put me right off the idea of joining any form of juvenile club. Maybe it was the uniforms and campsite revelry that I distrusted the most. It all starts off innocently enough with a Ging Gang Gooly, but it doesn’t take too long before a lusty rendition of Tomorrow Belongs To Me breaks out. There was something about organised camaraderie that just didn’t appeal. And that is why I felt a little shudder when I recently came across The Climate Club, and its avowed mission:

The Climate Club engages young scholars to deliver digestible information on climate, sustainability, and environmental health. Through our platform, we aim to not only communicate science and combat misinformation, but to also empower young scientists across the world to voice their perspectives and write evidence-based, non-biased articles to engage the public in critical thinking and active reasoning.

All this talk of ‘combat’, ‘active reasoning’ and an empowered youth across ze vorld sounds just a tad gung-ho to me. It just looks too much like an incitement to activism; a form of engagement made even more explicit by a charming little children’s book I also discovered recently, titled ‘The First Rule of Climate Club’. It is written by an ex-schoolteacher called Carrie Firestone, who seems intent on ensuring that young and impressionable minds are called to arms in the fight against whatever has been unnerving the average Guardian reader of late. The social benefits of indoctrination have never been knowingly undersold and it seems that the ‘engagement’ starts very young. All very alluring and character-building I’m sure, but not for me.

Actually, when I think about it, my aversion to the comforts of the cultish was very much behind my embryonic attraction to science. Here was a way of life in which the acceptance of the fact didn’t seem to depend too much upon receiving ‘digestible information’ administered from a suitably endorsed ‘platform’. All that mattered is that Nature should be consulted every now and then to see what she thought of it all. It was the perfect paradigm for the youth who flattered himself as being an independent thinker.

My new-found second favourite climate scientist, Professor Patrick Brown, obviously feels the same way, judging by the essay he wrote back in 2017. The title of his piece is ‘The fact illusion: Objective truth is elusive in (climate) science’ and in it Professor Brown explores misconceptions regarding the nature of science in the raw.  He starts off with a statement that I suspect few empirical sceptics could find issue with:

However, contrary to a popular notion, science can rarely be thought of as an authoritative body that simply swoops in and declares various statements as fact or fiction, true or false. Instead, science is a loosely-defined activity, conducted not by a central authority but by a myriad of competing organizations and individuals all over the world. Thus, our collective confidence in various scientific conclusions inevitably has to result from the subjective weighing of evidence rather than deference to a supreme authority.

He then develops the theme of the essay by asking a rhetorical question: Is science the Vatican or The Wild West? Brown opines that most people outside of science see it as the former, when the reality is that it is more like the latter. This he sees as one of science’s greatest advantages. As he puts it:

Science has its flaws (as all human endeavors do) but its decentralized nature and its incentive structure make it very difficult to corrupt.

Difficult, maybe, but ‘very difficult’, I am not so sure about. And given his recent experience, I suspect that Professor Brown must be having second thoughts. In his 2017 essay, he writes:

[S]cientists are humans and humans are social beings who are influenced by the zeitgeist of their proximate culture. Unfortunately, as political polarization has increased in the United States, many of us are becoming more and more hermetically sealed into our ideological bubbles where our ideas are not challenged and we only hear from other people who agree with us. I do worry that this phenomenon has the power to influence the collective research output and communication of climate science.

So he was worried, but not that worried. However, in a recent tweet on the platform formerly known as Twitter, but now known as ‘X, formerly known as Twitter’, he said this:

I wrote this in 2017, and it has significant overlaps with my Free Press essay that resulted in a lot of controversy…In the intervening six years, my opinion moved away from a feeling of ‘caution’ regarding biases in high-profile papers and much more towards a feeling of ‘concern’.

In my introduction I alluded to the comforts of the cultish. Of course, I didn’t mean to be taken literally; I’m not saying that the climate science community, or organisations such as The Climate Club, should be seen as cults. But it still has to be said that the outcry caused by Professor Brown’s Free Press article does look a little like the sort of treatment a former member can expect to receive when they try to leave a cult; demonization and disownment seemed to be the order of the day. The problem is that being a bit like the Wild West is not an altogether good thing. Certainly, it is all about the pioneering spirit, loosely governed, but it is also a society that operates through the benefit of lynch mobs and posses that tend to look dimly upon people who step out of line.

Consequently, we had Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, saying that what Brown had done was ‘monumentally unethical’.  We had Lisa Schipper, professor of development geography at the University of Bonn, saying that Brown’s actions were ‘very, very weird behaviour indeed’. We had Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director of the Grantham Reasearch Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, referring to Brown’s ‘bogus narrative’. We had former BBC environment correspondent Richard Black accusing Brown of reviving the ‘ancient canard’ of journal bias. And to cap it all we had that paragon of academic propriety, Michael Mann, saying, ‘If I were Patrick Brown’s PhD adviser, I would regard this as a personal failure’. Worse still, Mann goes on to show how utterly clueless he is by referring to Professor Ken Rice’s ‘expertly detailed’ account of the ‘sordid tale’ — an account that was so expertly detailed that it reproduced nothing of Brown’s article and managed to completely misconstrue the relevance of his dialogue with the Nature referees.

What makes all of the above really rather shocking is that Patrick Brown had not actually said anything that wasn’t demonstrably true (i.e. that there is a self-evident and worrying lack of quantification of non-climatic causations in published attribution studies). He just had the temerity to suggest that a journalistic penchant for the simple, climate-focused narrative was playing a role in the resulting imbalance. So all he had done was to faithfully and accurately described some of the workings of Climate Club, when the first rule is that you don’t talk about Climate Club.

The desire to cast him out is just human nature really, but I fear it also comes with a good dose of human nurture. I’d like to believe that, in the hands of the next generation, climate science could become a broader church than the Vatican, without descending into the Wild West. But when I see that aspiring young climate scientists can join up with an organisation that actually calls itself The Climate Club, and then I see a children’s book carrying the title, ‘The first Rule of Climate Club’, I have to admit to being just a little pessimistic.