One of your letter writers asks “where’s the outrage?” in the scientific community about climategate, and Daniel Henninger wonders--to briefly paraphrase--surely there are those scientists who worried about the credibility of science as the rhetoric leading to this scandal accelerated. There are plenty of us who have worried about this, in my case starting two decades ago when the pathologies that led to climategate began to emerge. On the issue of climate change, the convergence of large sums of public (free!) money, egos, complex science, and politics led inevitably to where we are today. Some of us who saw it coming but did not speak out as vigorously or publicly as we could have are now thrashing ourselves for having naively thought that, somehow, it could never get as bad as we feared.
Now, of course, the rhetoric has become so heated that many are either afraid to speak out or exhausted by the thought of being shouted down after even the mildest dissent. I have been appalled at the reactions of colleagues whom I otherwise respect when I voice my doubts about one or another point of the science. There is a reason why, with the exception of some courageous scientists like Richard Lindzen, many of the most vocal critics of the AGW hypothesis are retired. They are not in their dotage and out of touch; it’s that they have nothing to lose. Those of us who are still practicing our science are reluctant to become the whipping boys of the rabid AGW-hypothesis believers (I use “believers” deliberately), if for no other reason than responding takes so much time away from our research, teaching, and students. For younger scientists, the consequence are even direr—they may not ever get grants, papers published, or promotion.
The level of the discussion in the emails downloaded from CRU (many of which I have read myself) is not business-as-usual, as some apologists for climategate have tried to imply. At best, the language is supremely arrogant in its callous disrespect for the science and its other practitioners. At worst, it is everything the talk show hosts claim—outright scientific fraud. The answer is perhaps somewhere in between, but anything less than transparency and honesty is unacceptable. We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard, the more so if our science has a direct impact on society. We must not just tolerate criticism, but embrace it. This is all beside the fact that the participants knew full well that their emails were subject to Freedom of Information requests yet still used such intemperate language. That some of the emails “don’t read well” is an appallingly weak excuse from such intelligent people and only serves to highlight their arrogance.
In the science of complex systems—and few physical processes are more complex than climate--there will always be data that do not fit the favored hypothesis. We are obligated to honestly present all the data and, if we exclude some from our analyses or alter some, we must nevertheless still present the raw data and be forthright about our reasons for omitting or altering it. Why? One reason, of course, is that it is the honest thing to do. But more importantly, those data are critical for other scientists who might want to replicate our results, replicability being the hallmark of good science. And those data may be the very data that prove critical to a new understanding as the science advances. If one works on complex systems, one will inevitably and eventually be wrong. That is nothing to fear because if we are proved wrong, it means the science has advanced; we were right at one time in the context of what was known, but as more is known, we often must revise our conclusions. No scientist has suffered from this process.
But enter politics, and all that changes. The scientists of complex systems must speak in probabilities. Policymakers don’t want to hear “probable”, they want to hear “certain”. Scientists, being good citizens, try to comply, but if the issue becomes important enough, an amplification takes over, with the policymakers pushing for ever-more certainty and the scientists trying ever harder to comply because their research funding comes to depend on it. If the scientists then taste political power, they believe their own certainty and become entrenched in their hypotheses. It is this entrenchment—whatever drives it—that gets scientists into trouble. This has happened over and over in the history of science. What is remarkable about climategate is the scale and the potential consequences. I hope Daniel Henninger is wrong that this could harm all of science; I fear that he might not be.
