The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t . . .
We will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! . . .
If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone . . .
And so on. Since their release last November, the famous hacked emails from scientists in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have provided a rich source of such incriminating phrases. Participants, including some of the leading figures in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), discuss how to prevent skeptics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, plot to destroy or suppress the raw data underlying their studies, suggest ways to massage the figures for better effect, and generally carry on in a tone more evocative of the “war room” than the common room.
To many, the emails offer disturbing evidence that a number of prominent climatologists have crossed the line, from science into activism. It is clear they view dissenters, not as critics to be engaged, but enemies to be beaten. But in fact there is a more fundamental problem at work: a breakdown of trust between scientists and large sections of the lay public.
Previous ages may have been more prone to error, but not to doubt: whatever foolish things they believed, they believed them together. Ours is a very different era. Science has pushed the boundaries of human knowledge to limits never before imagined. Yet all sorts of anti-scientific, indeed pre-scientific beliefs are flourishing at the same time, from the enduring appeal of naturopathy and other folk cures to the hysterias over childhood vaccines and genetically modified foods, all the way to the dreadful pseudo-science of “intelligent design.”
The science writer Michael Specter has called these examples of denialism, a habit of mind that replaces “the rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment.” But of course that is exactly what skeptics accuse global warming scientists of: a divine certainty of their own rightness that not only blinds them to legitimate criticism, but gives rise to the sorts of behaviour described in the East Anglia emails.
This is why “Climategate” may prove something of a watershed. In the battle for public opinion, global warming advocates have until now had the singular advantage of claiming that the bulk of respectable scientific opinion was on their side. If at least some of that scientific opinion is discovered to be not so respectable as all that, then it is not only their specific case that is harmed: it is science itself.
So the crisis of trust runs both ways. And, what is more, each has good reason to distrust the other.
Look at it from the climate scientists’ perspective. They have spent many years of their lives immersed in the subject. The data they cite has been drawn from any number of sources, thousands of measuring points, hundreds of studies, all of them submitted to rigorous peer review. Yet they are asked to debate people who in many cases have plainly not read or thought seriously about the issue, and who persist in raising objections that have long since been knocked to the ground. Small wonder that global warming advocates have taken to referring to them as “deniers,” flat-earthers or worse.
But now look at it from the public’s perspective. I don’t mean the already committed, pro or con, most of whom live in the bliss of believing what they want to believe. I mean the honestly confused, trying to puzzle out a complex scientific question they are not remotely qualified to judge, yet which will ask them to make the most profound political choices, with all sorts of potential consequences for their future welfare.
