Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Climate science and moving beyond hackergate

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

By now, everyone has heard of the hacked emails from the British Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University. The play-by-play has been getting a lot of press, especially at Dot Earth and Climate Progress.  Rather than focus on the specifics, I want to help us keep focused on larger issues, which I think is useful for getting past the heated rhetoric.

Yesterday, Bryan Walsh ran a story, As Climate Summit Nears, Skeptics Gain Traction in Time Magazine in which the following passage appeared:

Even a small amount of doubt is enough to shatter consensus. That is why a number of researchers have suggested in the wake of the CRU e-mail hack that climate scientists be more open with their data and engage with critics in the future. “Climate McCarthyism” — as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute have called the knee-jerk attacks by some climate-change advocates on those who deviate from the green mainstream — must stop. That may not seem fair — industry groups have played dirty for years smearing climate scientists — but researchers will need to be above reproach. “Scientists need to consider carefully skeptical arguments and either rebut them or learn from them,” wrote Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist and climate researcher at Georgia Tech, on the blog Climate Audit.

There are several things to consider:

The scientific process is a powerful tool—in many ways, the most powerful tool we have.  All ideas should be allowed at the table and should be investigated thoroughly.  Yes, even the ideas of climate skeptics.  The notion that scientists might have attempted to short circuit the peer review process is unfortunate. This should never happen.

However—and this is an important point that has not been stated strongly enough—when a fair peer review process rejects ideas for not standing up to intense scrutiny, as determined by several sources of empirical observations and models, it’s time to move beyond the false ideas for the sake of clarity and efficiency.  Climate skeptics and warming advocates alike who lose on the battlefield of peer review need to own their loss, suck it up, and move on.  Returning to the table is fine, but do it with new ideas that better help us understand the way the world works, rather than trotting out retreads or, worse, advancing an agenda.

I tell my students that the outcome of science isn’t meant to be fair.  However, the process of science is fair.  At the starting blocks, it accepts all ideas and sifts through them one by one to see which ones stand the test of scrutiny (data and models and other lines of evidence) and which ones don’t.  The ones that don’t are discarded to the dustbin of history.   The ideas that survive get to live another day until subject to refined analysis and new data, models, and ways of thinking.  Over time, if they continue to survive, they become generally accepted ways of describing our world.  Much of what we know about climate warming, such as the  role of greenhouse gases in causing warming, fits this bill.  Of course, something may come along that could revolutionize conventional wisdom—Einstein did that to Newtonian mechanics with his theories of relativity—but until that happens, scientifically based conventional wisdom that has withstood the test of time is simply the best process we have at getting closer to the truth on climate warming science.

Problems arise when people conflate outcomes and process—equating, for instance, a bad outcome (rejected idea) to an unfair process.  This can lead to a rejection of science as a a way of knowing, and that’s unfortunate.  People don’t have the choice of rejecting the scientific method simply because they lose.  That’s the game of a poor loser.  The challenge is for them to come back with a winning idea.

It’s all too easy for climate science to become politicized.  Everyone knows this.  With regards to skeptics—contrarian for the sake of contrarianism.  With regards to warming advocates—overly dismissive of alternative viewpoints.  At that point, science crosses the threshold to ideology, which has no place in the peer review process. Fortunately, ideology seldom lasts long in a well-oiled peer-review meat grinder.

So why don’t I worry?  Because I return, over and over, to a singularly powerful idea:  In the end, a fair peer review process will lead us closer to the truth.   The furnace we call the climate warming debate is blistering.  This is why we must make sure the crucible of a fair review process is strong enough to withstand it.  And so far the peer review process most likely has been fair.   There are too many independent research groups studying climate change, involving tens of thousands of scientists worldwide, who are reaching the same basic conclusions about warming.  It’s simply impossible for a conspiracy to ever grow that big.

What we need now more than ever is for both sides of the climate debate to consider all ideas and for the losers (of a fair process) to own their loss.   Sure, it’s a high-stakes game, and nobody likes to lose.   But some will.  The question is whether the losers will continue by pushing an agenda rather than useful ideas.   History will be a harsh critic of those who do.