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The scientific implications of the Climategate files are probably small, but the political implication is certainly large–because of the politicized nature of climate science confirmed by the files. Verification of the existence of conspiring enforcers of orthodoxy weakens the strongest rhetorical weapon in the alarmist arsenal. The idea that the science behind predictions of potentially catastrophic warming is rock solid and that the putative scientific consensus reflects the rock solidity of the science licenses the inference that there is no scientifically respectable excuse for skepticism of or disagreement with the consensus. That is a big stick to thump people with. But the Climategate files strongly suggest that at least some of the science is not rock solid and that the scientific consensus is at least in part the product of silencing or marginalizing those who might upset it. The files have made “How can we be sure that you did not fudge your data” and “How do we know that dissenting voices have been given a fair hearing?” questions that we now must ask rather than questions skeptics can be effectively shouted down for asking. The files show that suspicion is warranted. That’s a big deal.
I've been a climate change skeptic for this exact reason. Injecting politics into science is like having the Yankees act as the employer for all MLB umpires; you just can't trust the results.
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I think if you are a climate skeptic for this reason you have to be skeptical of all science (not a bad thing). The dirty secret of science is that experiments are imperfect and data sets are ugly. Exposing this to the world casts less doubt on what we know about global warming and more on science worship.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that this is about politics. It's not just the climate debate that should be subject to scrutiny. Science often turns on the egos of the scientists publishing papers and this is no exception. They wanted to show immaculate data with no uncertainty in their conclusion. Unfortunately that's not the way science works. This doesn't mean their conclusion isn't correct. It just means their story isn't as perfect.
What I've read of the emails that were leaked is fairly mundane (i.e. replacing reconstructed temperature data from tree ring density measurements with instrumental data). The science is sound if not pretty, which opens a lot of cracks for hack scientists to pry at. Yes, it would have been better to be forthcoming in the first place and suffer the slings and arrows of the scientific community, but mistaking this for a mountain when it is so clearly a molehill is not the solution.
I think you are talking about confirmation bias, an inherent problem in scientific methodology. I think Climategate is an extreme version of this.
ReplyDeleteClimate change has become dominated, and I mean dominated, by polarizing politics, more so than any other hard scientific field (including evolutionary biology). In the research area, conclusions now come before data collection and controlled experiment. This subtly occurs in any prediction-based system (more so in soft science I would think), but is occuring blatantly in this field.
My point is, show me another hard science field where a similar things is occuring (at least that we know about)?
Read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=4