Wood Romances

On Facebook I recently came across a character by the name of Joseph Postma. I had come across some of his ideas on YouTube in the past and had quite a laugh at some of the nonsense that he puts in his videos, but recently Postma started participating in a group that I participate in, so I've interacted with him personally. For those of you unfamiliar with him, his ideas should best be understood as coming from the lunatic fringe of contrarian thinking. In fact, I'm seriously tempted to think that he doesn't actually believe what he says, but he's basically seeing how absurd he can be and still get people to believe him. To be sure, he has not yet convinced even the most radical of people blogging on some of the most popular contrarian sites. I mean, WUWT has posted criticisms of his views, Willis Eschenbach has publicly disagreed with him, and Roy Spencer has devoted at least one post  to responding to his claims. Even David Burton has taken issue with Postma. In othe...

Patrick Brown recently published a blogpost in which he suggested that in order to get published in highly prestigious journals, you have to follow a "not-so secret" formula. Another version of this shows up in the Free Press . According to Brown, "the formula is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society." Now I want to be clear about a few things before I get into this. First, it appears he's not attacking peer-reviewed journals in general or even highly respected journals a tier below the top echelon of Nature and Science . It also doesn't appear that he thinks these journals are forcing a narrative that isn't true; only that they are preferentially selecting the negative aspects of AGW over others factors, and science would benefit if these journals published more useful and comprehensive analyses. And he also seems to acknowledge that the kinds of mo...