Climategate or, as Wikipedia calls it, the “Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident”, has been all over the Internet for some time now and I do not feel like adding anything substantial to the discussion. However, the editorial in this week’s Nature has provoked quite a strong reaction on my side. The editors write:
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.
Please, read the whole article and form your own opinion. Maybe I am overreacting but I have already expressed my distaste in the comment I have written under an article on “Climate Feedback”, Nature’s blog covering the subject of climate change.
The comment
I cannot believe how tasteless this editorial is. Not only the zealous tone and derogatory words such as “denialist” are things that should never happen in a respected scientific publication, Nature completely missed some important issues.
- Defending science is not synonymous with defending particular scientists. Science is a mode of discovery, a process that is designed specifically to minimize the influence of human faults and biases on final results. What this editorial shows is tribal mentality on the part of the editorial staff and in this community such behavior should be nothing to be proud of. CRU scientists have not only been extremely rude (politeness is helpful but not necessary to do good science), they have been also careless about archiving the raw data used in their research and indices (or “value-added” data) they produce. They even admit they erased parts of it for reasons that just do not add up.
- The stolen (?) emails do reveal a conspiracy. Organized efforts to withhold release of data subject to FOIA based on the person who made the requests constitute a conspiracy even though it is not the kind of global all-encompassing plot some people would like to find in the material that has been leaked. The same goes for making sure that “improper” e-mails have been deleted by every person involved.
- I am not sure whether “Mike’s trick” is something truly legitimate. There are “tricks” in mathematics but we know they are correct because they are proven mathematical procedures for solving particular problems. From what I understand about how folks at Real Climate and Climate Audit describe the problem, “Mike’s trick” is joining two data series coming from completely different sources (proxies vs. instrumental readings) and then smoothing them as one. Is this something that should be done? Shouldn’t they, for example, be compared as two distinct series instead?
I am truly agnostic about scientific basis on which the AGW theory is built. I am not a climatologist therefore I cannot asses this field but I am interested in economic and political implications of policies that take climate science as granted. Policy making has its own quirks with special interest groups, lobbying and rent seeking kicking in whenever there is substantial amount of wealth to be redistributed. I would like to be sure that at least what is preached as science is indeed science.
Please, correct me if I am wrong. Thank you.