Wake up call for climate scientadvocates
Posted December 3, 2009 at 7:14 am 
Filed in: As the climate negotiations begin this coming Monday- coincidentally enough on Pearl Harbor Day (one assumes Glenn Beck is already on that), the hacking/leaking of email exchanges between climate scientists gets a thoughtful treatment in today’s WSJ. Don’t be fooled by the heading – “Climategate: Science Is Dying” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html). The piece itself, by Daniel Henninger contains some valid points about the larger implications of the hacked/leaked emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit.
“Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals.”
Another perspective is that the political policy process doesn’t do very well with nuance. And nuance is precisely what’s needed when talking about potential impacts of climate change decades into the future. The real danger of alarmism posing as science is that it can lead to cynicism about what is clearly true (greenhouse gas emissions are raising global surface temperatures) because of confusion about what may become true (the litany of horrors that are projected from specific increases in temperatures at specific times in the future).
Henninger overstates the case a bit when he writes:
“Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost.”
No, not ”almost unimaginable financial cost.” Measures to be taken do have costs, but they also have benefits. And those benefits go beyond preventing climate change damage to include increasing our energy security — since many of the measures proposed also reduce our dependence on foreign oil. That’s a manifestly good thing and worth an upfront investment in the near term merely on its own merits.
Henninger is on point when he notes that:
“The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims-plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish-evokes the attempt to silence Galileo.” Ok, an evocation of Galileo might go a little far, but point well taken.
So while the bullying, mocking and ostracizing are more junior high than high science, the really crucial issue was expressed very well in another private email from a climate scientist, commenting on the whole kerfluffle:
“But let me just say that as a scientist trying to be impartial about this, I want to see the data. Show me specifically what datasets and results these e-mails indicate have been falsified/dishonestly manipulated. Show me what published papers are thus invalid and need to be retracted – I want citations so I can see what other work builds on those papers. Show me how this affects/alters our understanding of climate science. Instead, all I see are vague, clearly out-of-context statements mixed in with things that have nothing to do with science whatever (like scientists saying they personally dislike certain deniers).”
True enough. If the real issue is lack of willingness to share data with known climate change deniers and taking steps to thwart deniers’ attempts to access the data, that may be problematic, but it is different from the issue of the validity of those data in the first place.
The problem with policy disputes that get carried on with religious fervor is that fervor leaves little room for reasoned analysis. What seems clear about the climate debate is that bad things may well happen. And the rational response to the possibility of future bad occurrences is usually some type of insurance. Precisely what type of insurance we should be buying, and how much we should pay for it, and what kinds of benefits it could bring in addition to catastrophic protection — that’s the kind of debate policy-makers should be having, whether over emails or in Congress.
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