Climategate Turns 16: Never Forget

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

Another anniversary is marked regarding one of the greatest scientific scandals in the history of physical science, politicized physical science. Many books have been written on Climategate, one of the best, in terms of finding middle ground, being Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (Random House UK: 2010).

Pearce, then climate reporter at the The Guardian, wrote an extensive opinion-page editorial at the Progressive Left organ. His “Climategate’ was PR disaster that could bring healthy reform of peer Review,” was fronted by this editor note:

In a unique experiment, The Guardian published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.

We hoped to approach that complete account by harnessing the expertise of people with a special knowledge of, or information about, the emails. We wanted the protagonists on all sides of the debate to be involved, as well as people with expertise about the events and the science being described or more generally about the ethics of science. 

Fred Peace began:

The response of the science establishment to the hacking is set to become a case study in public relations disasters. One PR figure from a major environment group said: “Their response will be taught in university communications courses – because I’m going to make sure it is.”

After quoting the reactions from those involved– Michael Mann (“a high-level orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem”); Phil Jones (“ludicrous”); Kevin Trenberth and IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri (an attack on Copenhagen’s COP 15); [1] Ben Santer (“the vilest personal attacks [from] powerful forces of unreason”)– Pearce opined:

But the contents of the emails was not edifying for anyone. And the sceptics were making hay. They gleefully blogged that the emails revealed extensive data manipulation….

The status quo went defensive, Pearce next noted.

The mood changed. Even Mann, whose words featured prominently in early soundbites published from the emails, began an op-ed in the Washington Post with the words: “I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote.” The website that Mann co-hosts, RealClimate, offered the half-apologetic insight that the emails offered “a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined

Pearce’s historically important piece went on to explain the problem of climate science not being replicable and the need for data transparency, what the Climategate controversy brought to light. He documented a wide call for openness to replace “tribalism” in climate science, quoting from scientists.

[Climate researcher Mike] Hulme and [philosopher Jerry] Ravetz called for a “major change in the relationships between science and the public”, with wider public scrutiny of its findings and methods using “the proliferating new communication media… Science is a deeply human activity, and we need to be more honest about what this entails.”

And in 2025, 16 years and 16 COPS later, the public is souring on climate-model alarmism and the public policies therein. Confident predictions from causality-deficient and untestable climate models sound alarms that time refutes. The estimated warming itself begs the question: what anthropogenic warming is good, bad, or benign? And what side-effects are negative or positive?

Killing the Messenger

Today, Climategate apologists complain that the November 2009 hack was just a fossil-fuel conspiracy and an excuse for “denialists.” Stephen Schneider, a global-cooling-to-global-warming alarmist, complained about “the hackers illegally obtain[ing] private emails among exasperated climate data scientists decrying their besieged status by some politicians and fossil fuel interest groups trying to deny global warming and attacking their work and character….”

The climate “skeptics” community immediately labeled it “climate-gate” as if the climatologists whose private thoughts, doubts and frustrations were now widely disseminated without context and sent to media and political venues, were the perpetrators, rather than the victims. My favorite label on this sad debacle is simply: ‘Climate Denier Gate’ to refocus on the ‘gate’ part.

He continued:

The email blogs asserted, and the media dutifully covered it as a scandal of climate scientists’ cover-ups. Thus, the private frustrations of a few climate scientists was turned into an ostensible plot by the entire climate science community in dozens of countries, hundreds of institutions, and hammered out over 40 years of peer reviewed assessment studies … as some kind of fraud.

But even the most sympathetic alarmist could not erase the behind-the-curtain look at the United Nations/Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN/IPCC) consensus–and the whitewash that followed. And remember what Schneider himself said, Climategate-like:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts.

On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination.

That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. [2]

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[1] Pearce noted: “The emails made little impression at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen in early December. This was about raw politics and not climate science.”

[2] Schneider. Quoted in Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth.” Discover (October 1989), pp. 45-48.

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