Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science

The scientific method only works when fellow researchers can implicitly trust the results offered by their colleagues.

November 22, 2009 - by Charlie Martin

On November 19, 2009, climate science was severely shaken by the release of a collection of email messages, together with a collection of data and data processing programs, that were alleged to have been stolen, or hacked, from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). (See here and here for previous Pajamas Media coverage.)

So what is this “climate science” of which we speak? Trimmed down to the essentials, what scientists really do comes down to these steps:

1.Look at something happening.
2.Think of a way to explain what’s happening.
3.Make a convincing case, based on evidence and experiment, that this is the best known explanation. Part of this “convincing case” is providing enough information so that a knowledgeable person could, if necessary, perform the same experiments and get the same results. (This should really include some weasel-wording about “within experimental error,” but that’s a technical detail. What’s important is that the knowledgeable third party can get close enough to the same results to satisfy that third part.)
4.Submit that convincing case to other knowledgeable people to review, in order to see if they also find it convincing. This is what is called peer review.
5.Publish that convincing case for the rest of the world, where the results can be seen, commented upon, and challenged.
6.Every so often, others perform the same experiments and confirm or question the results.

Step 4, peer review, is essential to this whole process.

Pajamas Media

Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?

Just one of the scandals is the willingness to manipulate data to make a political case.

November 22, 2009 - by Charlie Martin

Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. The institution is the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, home institution for Dr Phil Jones and one of the world’s centers of research into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or “climate change.”

snip

The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.

The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.

The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.

Read the article, including links to the source material at Pajamas Media