The Real Lesson Of "Climategate"

As a philosopher and historian of science, I believe the real lesson of “Climategate” isn't what it reveals about the practices of climate researchers (as media perspectives on both sides of the issue have largely assumed), but what it reveals about the beliefs of those criticizing these researchers…

“Climagate” began in Nov. 2009 with the hacking of a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, leading to the dissemination of thousands of emails and other primate documents. On the basis of those emails and documents, it has been alleged that climate researchers withheld scientific information, interfered with the peer-review process, deleted emails and raw data, and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than it is.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have felt challenged by outside (non-scientific) authorities. Copernicus did not publish his work in astronomy for fear of persecution from the Church, and Galileo was placed under house arrest by the Pope in 1632 when he defended some of Copernicus’ ideas.

Nor is it the first time that non-scientific authorities have tried to overturn widely held scientific beliefs. In 1897, the Indiana House of Representatives passed a bill that “defined” π to be a rational number (only to have the bill die in Senate). And the opposition to evolutionary theory in the 1920s (culminating in the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’) was led by a group whose most impressive scientific authorities were a Canadian surgeon, a homeopathic medical-school dropout turned Presbyterian surgeon, and a science professor whose highest degree was a master’s awarded for a thesis on penmanship in Midwestern public schools.

Unlike the skeptics in the Indiana and Scopes cases, however, the skeptics of climate research have accused an entire scientific community of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.

Of course, CRU is just one of many climate research institutes claiming to have produced evidence of global warming, leading climate researchers to claim that whatever happened at CRU does not undermine the underlying scientific basis for global warming.

So then how do skeptics arrive at their conclusion that what happened at CRU undermines the scientific basis for global warming? They rarely spell out their argument in full. Here's my best attempt to reconstruct the sort of argument they appear to have in mind:

1. There is evidence that a number of climate researchers arrived at their conclusions with the help of subjective biases and deceptive manipulation of the data.

2. Good science involves a mode of inquiry that’s free of subjective bias and questionable manipulation of the data. (implicit premise)

3. Therefore, what a number of climate researchers have been doing doesn’t count as good science.

Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that “a number of climate researchers” referred to in premise 1 includes not only researchers at CRU, but also researchers at some of the other climate research institutes claiming to have arrived at the same basic conclusions regarding global warming.

Moreover, let us also assume that the subjective biases and deception of these investigators really did have an impact on the scientific conclusions they reached.

Even granting all of that, however, we would still need to make an additional assumption, along the lines of premise 2, in order to infer 3, the conclusion. But premise 2 is based on a highly questionable picture of how science works.

A different (and more realistic) picture of science is one that acknowledges that scientific investigators are human; and as such, are inevitably influenced to some degree by subjective biases (such as saving their professional reputation, ambition, grants and funding, commitment to a particular research program, and the like).

Once we acknowledge these subjective elements within the history of science, we must reject premise 2. Good science is not simply a function of the method followed by individual investigators but, rather, of the combined results of a community of scientists; fully objective science occurs when the vast majority of individual scientific investigators all reach the same conclusions, despite their subjective biases and attempts to manipulate the data in accordance with their various research agendas.

Of course, the scientific community could be wrong, as they have been in the past. But let’s not repeat the mistakes of the Pope in 1632 and the State of Indiana in 1897. The way to criticize science is not by attacking or ignoring the scientific community (or hacking into their email accounts), but through doing better science.