You know when you hear the “gate” suffix, somebody’s in deep.
So it was when the suspiciously timed “climategate” made headlines in November of last year, just ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen.
As a refresher, Climategate had two main features: the first was the discovery that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (2007) included specious claims that certain Himalayan glaciers were receding. The second, more famous component concerned e-mails that were stolen from climatologists at East Anglia University.
A panel of climate law specialists at The University of Texas recently looked at both issues during a colloquium, and the consensus was that — as bad as both had been for the reputation of science itself, nothing has changed about the fundamentals of climate change: It’s real, we’re causing it, and we ought to be scared.
That the flawed Himalayan study came to light was seen as proof that the IPCC system is transparent and therefore works. To a panelist, the IPCC was seen as the victim of its own success. The IPCC, which is 22 years old and is now working on its fifth assessment, states that its work is “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” The only criticism the panel came in for was that it was, if anything, too conservative, being a group that only proceeded after consensus.
The issues surrounding the stolen e-mail threads are both more controversial and more complicated. While the e-mails — which unadvisedly used the terms “trick” and “hide the decline” — have found few defenders and even were called “awful” by one of their authors, the panelists seemed amazed that large segments of the public now believe that climate change policy could be driven by a shadowy cabal, let alone that it is.
The British House of Commons conducted an extensive investigation and hearing and concluded at the end of March that “the scientific reputation of Professor (Phil) Jones (the unit’s director) and CRU remains intact” and that the e-mails and claims raised in the controversy did not challenge the scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.” Also, the House’s committee had found no evidence that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.
The biggest criticism the scientists took from the House of Commons investigation was for perpetuating a culture of hoarding data. The whole reason for the e-mail exchange was a demand by a climate skeptic that he be given the Climate Research Unit’s raw data. The question of who should control data is one few lay people give much thought to.
Camille Parmesan, on faculty in The University of Texas Section of Integrative Biology, as a rule gives the nod to the researcher who gathered the data in the first place. While the right of others to examine data is basic to the scientific method, others do not, she said, have the right to the raw data. That data, which is usually gathered at a huge expense to the original researchers’ time and energy, can be the basis for multiple publications and therefore lay a career path.
Making all of the raw data instantly available to anyone who wants it means that the original gatherer of the data could be scooped, her future work preempted by other scientists. The effect of this, says Parmesan, clearly would be to disincent researchers from gathering data in the first place. The loser would be science itself.
That said, Parmesan added that there’s a continuum of sharing everything, sharing something, and sharing nothing, and that the British scientific community long has been at the extreme of data secrecy.
Climate change skeptics were giddy at the release of the East Anglia e-mails, and columnists hailed the scandal as the “final nail in the coffin” for this laughable movement that claimed humans were changing Earth’s atmosphere.
As for scientists and advocates of change like us, never have more people hoped and wished that their own conclusions were wrong.
