Climate science: Truth and tribalism

Editorial
The Guardian, Saturday 6 February 2010
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is the mantra of the courtroom, but it is also the motivating ideal of good science – as well as good journalism. The Guardian's special report into the leaked emails between climate scientists has revealed as many roughnesses, pimples and warts as any Cromwellian portrait. In and among (plentiful) electronic evidence of the University of East Anglia researchers going about their job diligently, we have uncovered an abject failure to ensure essential records were kept on Chinese weather stations, determined manoeuvring to exclude critics from leading journals and international reports, and suggestions of deleting potentially embarrassing correspondence with a view to evading the Freedom of Information Act.
For a newspaper that prides itself on leading the fight to fix the climate, avoiding such a forthright interrogation of the scientific pro­cesses on which our call for action ultimately depends might have been more comfortable – comfortable but wrong. The reality is that 4,660 files from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit are in the public domain. The pragmatic argument runs that it is better that these should be evaluated seriously, methodically and in proper context, rather than hyped and distorted on the blogosphere. The principled argument, however, is more powerful still. Scientific progress comes through free and frank debate, the bedrock of truth being revealed only after every muddying stratum above it has been penetrated and cleared away. Indeed, the settled core of our knowledge on climate – the fact of increasing atmospheric carbon, the rising temperature trend, and the heat-trapping mechanism linking the two – has acquired the terrific authority it now possesses precisely because it has been forced to withstand so many challenges in the past. The moment climatology is sheltered from dispute, its force begins to wane.
So the sort of closing of intellectual ranks witnessed at UEA was serious and, in the end, self-defeating. That point is made by the briefest glance at the sort of polemical denials which instantly found their way into the mainstream media after the emails first emerged, and was underlined yesterday by a new BBC poll which showed public scepticism has increased since November. What Copenhagen did for the chances of a meaningful climate deal, East Anglia has unwittingly done for the prospects of prevailing in the battle for hearts and minds. Before rushing to judgment on the hapless scientists involved, though, it is as well to recall the peculiar pressures that climate researchers face. The climate clock is ticking on civilisation and it falls to them to answer the all-important question about just how much time there is left to act. Providing the answer necessarily involves forecasting the future, inevitably a less certain business than making sense of the present, and yet as much certainty as possible is urgently required. The blatant foul play of the deniers invites a tit-for-tat response as a matter of human instinct, while the well-grounded suspicion that their aim is squandering precious time provides a seeming rationale for simply cutting them out of the debate.
The temptation to fall into tribalism is, then, understandable enough. It is also true that many of the specific sins involved, such as partial peer-reviewing and overly zealous defence of one's own research, are and always have been found in all manner of science departments. With climate, though, the stakes are higher – and so the standards must be too. The well-financed interests that are set to pay a heavy price from any curbing of emissions will do anything to discredit those uncovering facts that they would rather keep buried. Their arguments will get a sympathetic hearing from a public whose understanding can be distorted by the desire for an easy life. Complacency is tough stuff to puncture; only the purest strain of truth can be relied on to do the job.