Thursday, December 10, 2009
Climategate taints global warming science
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Steve Prisley
Prisley, of Blacksburg, is an associate professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech. He has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for two of their reports that dealt with the role of forests in carbon sequestration and climate change.
Recently, hackers published an archive of emails among scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and their colleagues internationally. The e-mails contain information that can be damaging to science, to climate change research and to international climate policy.
Discussion of the contents of the archive, including detailed analysis of the hundreds of pages of computer code, has gone viral on the Internet; the scandal has earned the moniker "Climategate." Damage control is under way in science and the media, as in The Roanoke Times editorial "Scientists being human" (Nov. 27). This is natural, given the extent to which many scientists, politicians and people in media are so heavily invested in climate change as a cause.
The news troubles me deeply as a scientist and as a contributing author for two reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The researchers at CRU have published some of the most widely cited reports that support anthropogenic climate change and have developed one of the most heavily relied upon databases of global temperature that exists. For this reason, what they do at CRU has profound meaning to scientists around the world.
I took the time to read some of the e-mails and the analysis. As noted in the editorial, the e-mails do not reveal a Luddite conspiracy, nor do they contain data that undermines climate science. But The Roanoke Times did not report what the e-mails do reveal:
n Scientists who have repeatedly refused to share data, models and analytic techniques, even under peer review requests and Freedom of Information law.
n Scientists who would rather destroy their data than risk analysis of that data by someone outside their circle (recent reports indicate that they have destroyed original temperature records, retaining only the altered data).
n Scientists who selectively screen data in order to produce politically desired results.
n Scientists who propose coercion to remove journal editors who are willing to publish dissenting views.
The e-mails cause this scientist to question the published results from "the Hockey Team," the cabal of scientists who have gone to great lengths to portray data to show dramatically rising temperatures (referred to as the "hockey stick" graph for the shape of the temperature line).
Certainly, there are other studies and other sources of data that support man-made climate change without the questionable research from the CRU. So it's not like climate science depends solely on this research. However, given the groupthink and herd mentality demonstrated by some climate change researchers in recent years, one must question how widespread this type of tactic is. Is it just defensiveness from a few brittle egos or is it something deeper?
Suppose you bought a case of packages of food for your family. You later learn that at least one of those packages contains poison, or E. coli, or salmonella or whatever. You would quickly discard that package. Then the next question is: Which of the other packages are you going to feed to your kids?
Why did the CRU team fight so hard to withhold their data from scrutiny? Why did they feel a need to coerce the peer-review process to prevent opposing or critical ideas from being published? How did they sift through data sets containing dozens of tree-ring records to find the 12 individual trees in Siberia that would show a temperature increase when all other combinations portray a decline?
Science is not served when scientists behave this way. Scientists should demand full inquiry; should support the type of peer review that involves making raw data and models accessible for scrutiny; should welcome publication of sound research even if it suggests alternative views.
We are indeed human; we do often suffer from swollen egos, but if our work cannot be scrutinized, then it is something other than science. Citizens should insist that their tax dollars fund only science that is open, accessible and can withstand detailed review. And scientists should take this opportunity for self-examination, lest we suffer the fate of those now being called "the East Angliars."
