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Science: What Mad Pursuit, 2

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Steven Hayward (Weekly Standard) has a balanced and thorough analysis of the climate science emails made public a few weeks ago. Hayward is not a knee-jerk global warming skeptic. He begins the final paragraph of his piece with “Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future.” And he, quite rightly, acknowledges that “The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation.” He recognizes the “distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists” whose public claims have been more cautious.

Instead, he sees the scandal as a particularly egregious revelation of the politicization of science: “What [the emails]reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. . . .

“There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists–otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming–there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.” In all this, he sees “scandalously unprofessional behavior.”

Hayward notes that “One of the striking features of the CRU emails is how much time the CRU circle spent discussing with each other the myriad problems with processing these data and how to display them to a wider world.” In itself, this is no problem: “this is typical of what one might expect of an evolving scientific enterprise.” The problem comes somewhere between the intramural discussion among the scientists and the public presentation of their conclusion: “these are the selfsame scientists who have insisted most vehemently that there is a settled consensus adhered to by all researchers of repute and that there is nothing left to debate.” This was not lost on the scientists. One wrote to Mann after his famous “hockey-stick” graph began to appear, cautioning him against “the possibility of expressing an impression of more consensus than might actually exist.”

Hayward suggests that since “the earth’s climate is a complex system, the effort to understand why and how it changes is arguably the largest undertaking ever conducted by the world’s scientific community.” The stakes would be very high even without the political dimension; given the political and economic import of the issue, the stakes are about as high as stakes get. It would be a catastrophe if the science that guided policy was distorted and skewed by politicized climate scientists, and the revelation of the emails is a crack in the facade that gives some hope that soberer heads will prevail.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 9:04 am

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Science: What Mad Pursuit, 2

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