Glacier Bay, Alaska
The big news story this week, dubbed “Climategate” , involves the release of hacked emails from Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and a professor at Pennsylvania State University. What’s most notable about the reporting is the lack of reporting on certain major US news networks. I commend CNN for their relatively unbiased reporting on this on their website, however other networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – chose to bury the story by not even reporting on it. I was going to commend Fox News for the initial story on the scandal, but the latest story they ran turned it into a political attack on Obama.
Unfortunately, ignoring the story has just fueled the rumors that climate change is a big conspiracy.
What really is happening here is that the public is now aware of just how inflated the egos of scientists can be. Jones’ and his correspondants’ communications reveal the cut-throat, political game that, for good or for bad, underlies academic science. While scientists are supposed to be unbiased, objective, enlightened minds – they are also human and still subject to human bias and pettiness.
But… this does not mean that all climate science is crap! There are peer review processes, where independent scientists review other scientists’ data before it is published. While these processes aren’t always perfect, they certainly help. There is definitely room to improve the way science is done and disseminated – making more raw data available, improving the peer review process, etc. Perhaps it’s time for a national converstation on this, as it is tax payer dollars that fund many of these projects.
However, it’s important to remember that the entire tree of climate research is not completely spoiled by one rotten apple.
Scientific (mis)Communications 
4 comments
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December 5, 2009 at 11:52 pm
davidjbolton
Nice blog Jen, especially the small dig at Fox (who you know I am such a fan of!).
Climate change is happening, only the foolish choose to ignore facts…..which brings me back to Fox News.
December 6, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Dan
For another excellent take down of the crazy conspiracy theorists take of the CRU emails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg
December 6, 2009 at 8:06 pm
jenleslie
Thanks for the link Dan, that’s a great video!
December 12, 2009 at 5:26 pm
hkyson
“Climategate” started out when there appeared on the Internet a collection of e-mails of a group of climatologists who work in the University of East Anglia in England. These documents reveal that some climatologists of international preeminence have manipulated the data of their investigations and have strongly tried to discredit climatologists who are not convinced that the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are the cause of global warming.
It is true that a majority of the scientists who study climatic tendencies in our atmosphere have arrived at the conclusion that the world’s climate is changing, and they have convinced a group of politicians, some of whom are politically powerful, of the truth of their conclusions.
A minority, however, is skeptical. Some believe that recent data that suggest that the average temperature of the atmosphere is going up can be explained by natural variations in solar radiation and that global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Others believe that the historical evidence indicating that the temperature of the atmosphere is going up at a dangerous rate is simply not reliable.
Such lacks of agreement are common in the sciences. They are reduced and eventually eliminated with the accumulation of new evidence and of more refined theories or even by completely new ones. Such debates can persist for a period of decades. Academics often throw invective at one another in these debates. But typically this does not mean much.
But the case of climate change is different. If the evidence indicates that global warming is progressive, is caused principally by our industrial processes, and will probably cause disastrous changes in our atmosphere before the end of the twenty-first century, then we do not have the time to verify precisely if this evidence is reliable. Such a process would be a question of many years of new investigations. And if the alarmist climatologists are right, such a delay would be tragic for all humanity.
The difficulty is that economic and climatologic systems are very complicated. They are not like celestial mechanics, which involves only the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force, and efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors that are influential in the evolution of these complicated systems.
All this does not necessarily indicate that the alarmist climatologists are not right. But it really means that if global warming is occurring, we cannot know exactly what will be the average temperature of our atmosphere in the year 2100 and what will be the average sea level of the world’s ocean in that year.
It also means that we cannot be confident that efforts by the industrialized countries to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will have a significant influence on the evolution of the world’s climate.
Alas, the reduction of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would be very costly and would greatly change the lives of all the inhabitants of our planet–with the possibility (perhaps even the probability!) that all these efforts will be completely useless.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.