Climate science: Inconvenient truths

Editorial
The Guardian, Thursday 3 December 2009

Blinded or at least baffled by science, the uninitiated majority imagine it as the sort of impersonal process a robot might carry out. Days before the Copenhagen climate conference – where scientific reasoning will make strenuous demands on everyday life – we have all been reminded that the frontiers of technical knowledge are not in fact advanced by automatons, but by fallible human beings.
The emails hacked out of East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit did not undermine the evidence that mankind is remaking the weather, but some of those who uncover the facts have adopted tribal attitudes. The effect is already evident – "The Big Climate Change 'Fraud'" was splashed on yesterday's Daily Express. The aftermath may also have helped persuade Tory David Davis to break the cross-party climate consensus by railing against the imposition of "hairshirt policies". The research unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, was right to belatedly recognise on Tuesday that he had to stand down while an inquiry got underway.
Of course it is true that private correspondence rarely looks great when thrust into full public glare. Perhaps Prof Jones felt initially, too, that his suggestion of "redefining" the peer-review process to prevent a particular paper attracting international attention was an obvious joke. And it is true that another scientist's suggestion of applying "tricks" to the data could have been a shorthand for processing it in a wizardly way, rather than manipulating it to mislead. But like politicians before them, climate scientists are learning the hard way that sticking to the rules is not enough – they must also to be seen to be sticking to them.
Data is often viewed through a tribal prism – think of the slant newspapers give to opinion polls, or the way financiers grab on to particular numbers. And climatologists confront particular pressures that encourage tribal thinking. For one thing, as well as the proper scepticism of the inquisitive mind, which all scientists face, they must tackle the talk-show brand of bastardised scepticism that is borne of wilful ignorance. Furthermore, the lessons of social science give reason to fear that raw climate science will not be taken sufficiently seriously. Climate projections are surrounded by margins of error, a vulnerability when humans are poor at grappling with risk and prone to letting self-interest cloud their thinking.
Another rule of public life, however, is that the cover-up does more harm than the scandal. Any suggestion that scientists are being less than frank will shred their credibility. The leaked emails are thus profoundly inconvenient for all of us who are concerned to make the world wake up to an inconvenient truth.