Climategate Refuses to Stay Under the Carpet
Last Friday looked like a red-letter day for climate change skeptics. A hacker (or inside leaker) posted over a thousand emails from the United Kingdom's Climate Research Unit online, sparking accusations of foul play by climate researchers. The first skeptics to write about the leak quickly dubbed it Climategate.
Well, several news cycles have now passed, and it looks like Climategate is falling far short of skeptics' hopes that it would explode the field of climate science.
All the righteous outrage in the world, it seems, is still insufficient to create the scandal of the century. By and large, it's not even breaking into the top headlines. That's not just liberal media bias; even conservative bastion Fox News isn't spending much time on Climategate. No huge surprise there. On Saturday, I argued that the email hack is not all it's cracked up to be, and most people seem to agree.
Yet Climategate is also stubbornly refusing to disappear, despite the efforts of the scientists involved to sweep it under the rug by explaining the wording of some questionable emails.
George Monbiot, a well-respected and staunch defender of climate change science at the UK's Guardian, explained today why he's not helping to kill Climategate:
Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial... It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.In other words, the best way to deal with this scandal is for the scientists involved to face the music, and for others to take the lead in research and create standards that won't allow scientists to engage in back-stabbing and manipulation (of their own data, or of the possibility of publication by other scientists).The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.
To my eyes, it's pretty clear why all the responses from the CRU and the scientists who are involved have so far been so wishy-washy. Obviously, they don't want their own careers or institutional prestige damaged, but it's also obviously too late to stop that from happening. Rather, they're afraid they might enable the scandal to blow out of proportion -- afraid that reasonable debate is impossible.
To an extent, this is a justifiable worry. The harshest criticism has come from non-scientists. Among scientific circles, even among most scientists skeptical of climate science, the reaction has been a sort of collective head nodding: they understand what happened. They just don't expect anyone else to. Here's some commentary from David Zetland, an outsider to the debate (he studies water issues):
My opinion is that this kind of sabotage, censorship, backstabbing and favoritism occurs all the time (just look at the editors of a journal and how many of their students and colleagues publish there...) My opinion is that this is going to give WAY too much impetus to the "climate change is not happening" crowd.All the fears that Climategate will be blown out of proportion are correct -- but so is Monbiot, in his opinion that the scandal nevertheless needs to be dealt with.And, you may ask, how can I trust the CC scientists, now that they are revealed to be "typical" humans? Because the gains (in career, fame, money, etc.) to ANYONE able to show that climate change is NOT happening, is all a hoax, etc. are extreme. With that kind of reward on the table (from Exxon?), anyone with a plausible analysis showing that it's not happening would be a rockstar.
If not for public relations purposes, then for political ones and legal ones. In one example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an aggressive lobbyist funded by businesses, said today that it will file suit against NASA for allegedly failing to fulfill requests for info made under the Freedom of Information Act. The suit appears to be the result of some the CRU emails, which suggest ways to block FOIA requests.
And Sen. James Inhofe, who has aggressively challenged climate change science for years, appears to be trying to open an inquiry into the emails. If Inhofe's past history is any guide, Climategate will continue to matter for months, no how much climate scientists want it to go away.