Nature on Climategate

Some emails among scientists were stolen recently and posted on the Internet, and some who have gone through those emails claim to have found evidence that research has been faked regarding the warming of the earth. I don't know if the earth is getting warmer or not or why the temperature fluctuates, and I do not know climate science well enough to evaluate their research results, but I am interested in the effort by agenda-driven people to cast the pearls of science before swine. Of all the gifts that liberal democracy brings us, I would have thought that science would be one that we would all agree on. Of course there are errors in science and sometimes fraud and everything else human, but the paradigms of science have given much to our modern lives, knowledge of the world and advances in tools as well as touching the leisurely moments of our lives. You have to say one thing about science: it works.

But not everybody seems to appreciate science so much. Some propagandists would like to assign science a value equivalent to one of Sarah Palin's off-handed comments about foreign policy, science is treated like just another opinion, and as we know, everybody's got one and they all stink.

You can understand the climate-science email controversy by reading conservative columnists and bloggers, or you can find out what scientists in the field say about it. Nature has an editorial this week on the issue called "Climategate" (and isn't it great that the White House party-crashers controversy can be called "gatecrashgate?").

Here's what Nature says:

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails. Climatologists under pressure

This editorial is a little long, and this isn't really the place to repeat and reexamine the evidence about global warming.

The thing that worries me is a trend away from critical thinking, a tendency of some members of our society to reject clear reasoning in favor of oversimplified visceral responding to complex events. At the local level it is a rejection of education itself, and disrespect for scholarly accomplishments. In our county we saw this when a small group of extremists wanted to keep valid medical and scientific facts out of the public schools' health curriculum, other regions have seen the attacks on the teaching of evolutionary facts in biology, there are lots of ways this tendency manifests itself. The attack on climate science advances a corporate agenda that has nothing to do with the truth or validity of scientific results, and we are seeing that some would like to broaden the excitement gleaned from these stolen emails to taint all of science.

This is the important point, I think:

A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

Scientists are people, they have all the weaknesses of ordinary people. But the formal system of science works pretty well in spite of being nothing but human beings. Peer-review is nothing more than social influence, but it is conducted in a certain atmosphere, with certain well-qualified participants, according to certain strict rules, and over time it has allowed human civilization to accomplish amazing things. Published research results are one thing, chit-chat among scientists is another.

Nature closes their editorial warning researchers to be careful in the way they discuss their work.

In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.