It reads like a climate denier’s dream come true: A prestigious climate scientist publicly confesses he fudged research in order to get published.

That’s basically how excited headlines in right-wing media have portrayed scientist Patrick Brown’s claim this week that he oversold the influence of climate change on wildfire risks in order to get a paper published recently in the prestigious journal Nature.

But the real story isn’t quite that simple.

At the top of his would-be mea culpa, Brown links to a column I wrote about last month’s Maui wildfires, citing it as an example of how the media contributes to a narrative that such conflagrations are “mostly the result of climate change.” While I appreciate the link, I must point out that nowhere in my column do I argue climate change was the primary cause of the Maui fires. I do strongly suggest it was a contributing factor, with much of the leeward side of the Hawaiian islands trapped in a drought cycle that has and will continue to be exacerbated by global warming.

But of course a host of other factors contributed to the Maui disaster, from questionable land management to human error. Assigning a precise percentage of the blame to climate change is impossible, at least for me, and probably for any actual scientists. But of course a host of other factors contributed to the Maui disaster, from questionable land management to human error. Assigning a precise percentage of the blame to climate change is impossible, at least for me, and probably for any actual scientists.

That sort of thinking should feel familiar to Brown, because that’s pretty much exactly how his Nature paper about wildfires begins, except more science-y:

“Some portion of the change in wildfire behaviour is attributable to anthropogenic climate warming, but formally quantifying this contribution is difficult because of numerous confounding factors...”