‘Climategate’: review of reviews
A UK government select committee has passed its verdict on the UEA leaked email fiasco reviews
The Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) published its report on the ‘climategate’ reviews last week, the latest twist in the saga that has held a spotlight on climate science for over the year.
The initial scandal led to immeasurable volumes of speculation and forced Professor Phil Jones – the scientist at the centre – into partial hiding, such was the pressure put on him. Professor Jones leads the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, where it was alleged that the researchers had knowingly fudged their climate data – using ‘Mike’s nature trick’ – then tried to ‘hide the decline’. These quotes were taken from leaked emails from the centre. The question arose: what were they doing in there and was there a climate conspiracy?[frax09alpha]
The brunt of the storm of accusatory theories appeared to have been weathered by the two main independent reviews into the scandal, which were published in 2010. Both the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review (ICCER) and the Scientific Appraisal Panel (SAP) report exonerated the scientists from any wrong doing, and a recent edition of the BBC’s flagship science programme, Horizon, openly supported Professor Jones. However, detractors have continued to attack the CRU and the transparency of the reviews. A governmental report into the latter was published last week. MP Andrew Miller, STC Chair, commented on both the original reviews – which had been commissioned by UEA. Climate sceptics will not be appeased by his key conclusion that “the clear and sensible recommendations of the two inquiries should be welcomed”. However, he criticised several aspects of each, and has made calls for a rethink about how Freedom of Information (FoI) request rules should apply to scientific data.
What is striking about the new STC report is that its criticism of the prior inquiries sounds familiar to those who remember their criticisms of the scientists, namely, a lack of openness. But openness introduces the potential for outside influences and pressure, and in the case of scientists, data theft. In an unrelated recent issue, scientists have been encouraged to share their data, leading a British scientist to comment that when the only measure of success in your business is publications, why would you let your peers crunch your data to gain the recognition arising from its use? Regarding the reports, my own view is that doing them away from the eye of the press helped the focus be placed on their conclusions, rather than on further fanciful opinion.
Bloggers such as James Delingpole, whose scientific credibility was damaged by the Horizon programme, will continue to question the scientific method, but an overarching conclusion to be drawn is that the vast majority of scientists can be trusted, and, in a discipline in which black and white are hard to define, our reliance on consensus is not evidence of conspiracy.
The Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) published its report on the ‘climategate’ reviews last week, the latest twist in the saga that has held a spotlight on climate science for over the year.
