Scientific Journal Defends Climate Scientists
EmailThe journal Nature — which has published many peer-reviewed research papers on global climate change — has decided to come to the defense of the researchers.
In an editorial, and in a news feature, it talks about the "climate of suspicion" under which the scientists work. It says their work is valid — but in the often-toxic political atmosphere in which they find themselves, they "need a sophisticated strategy for communication."
"Climate science, like any active field of research, has some major gaps in understanding," write the editors. "Yet the political stakes have grown so high in this field, and the public discourse has become so heated, that climate researchers find it hard to talk openly about those gaps. The small coterie of individuals who deny humanity’s influence on climate will try to use any perceived flaw in the evidence to discredit the entire picture. So how can researchers honestly describe the uncertainty in their work without it being misconstrued?
"The e-mails leaked last year from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, UK, painted a picture of scientists grappling with this question, sometimes awkwardly. Some of the researchers’ online discussion reflected a pervasive climate of suspicion — their sense that any findings they released to the public could and would be distorted by sceptics." (The spelling is theirs; Nature is based in Britain.)
The way to fight back, says the editorial, is by being open, respectful — and firm. People react to climate findings based as much on their personal values, it says, as on the facts. The researchers, it says, "must be frank about their uncertainties and gaps in understanding — but without conveying the message that nothing is known or knowable. They must emphasize that — although many holes remain to be filled — there is little uncertainty about the overall conclusions: greenhouse-gas emissions are rising sharply, they are very likely to be the cause of recent global warming and precipitation changes, and the world is on a trajectory that will shoot far past 2°C of warming unless emissions are cut substantially."
In the accompanying news feature, Quirin Schiermeier reminds readers that there are still considerable holes in our understanding of the climate system, and scientists are trying to fill them. But he says that when scientists try to address them, they're accused of hiding what they don't know.
The editorial is HERE, and Schiermeier's piece is HERE. Among other things, he quotes Gavin Schmidt, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and one of the keepers of the blog RealClimate.org.
"Of course there are gaps in our knowledge about Earth's climate system and its components, and yes, nothing has been made clear enough to the public," says Schmidt. "But this climate of suspicion we're working in is insane. It's really drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science when some people cry 'fraud' and 'misconduct' for the slightest reasons."
(NASA image from space shuttle Atlantis)
Angry Dad Shoots Teens Laptop 
Space Station Flies Over Eastern U.S. at Night 
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
I agree. The were wrong, but they were nice about being wrong.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
After all, these people are not members of the US Congress or they don’t live in the US White House.
Posted by: James L. | January 21, 2010, 11:10 am 11:10 am
Oh boo hoo. So after claiming ‘the science is settled’, and lambasting anyone who said differently, they want the general public to be sympathetic when they are forced to admit large gaps in their understanding? I hardly think so.
Posted by: Chris | January 21, 2010, 11:48 am 11:48 am
Mr. Potter,
I recommend you dig a little deeper on this story. It’s actually a fascinating one, and a particularly egregious example of poorly conducted science that has many in the science community fuming. As a practicing scientist (in molecular biology), I have been shocked and appalled by what I have learned about the behavior of these climate “scientists”, and quite concerned about the impact on those of us who take our profession seriously.
The science is far from “settled”. In fact there’s hardly any real science at all. There is a great deal of data manipulation to fit a single hypothesis, along with poor models that cannot explain natural variation. Nature magazine is unfortunately complicit in this as a major publisher of AGW papers. In my field all the data and analyses are required to be made available for publication, but apparently this was unnecessary for papers published in Nature on AGW. Shameful all around.
This attempt to back pedal on the “settled” science would be comical if it weren’t so important to the political world. Skepticism is a trait that should be highly valued in science, and the best scientists are intensely skeptical of their own data and interpretations. This is clearly not the case for this group of climate scientists. They come across as the true believers aligned against the skeptics. In the AGW world, skeptics are considered heretics (deniers). Non-believers are shunned.
Like many others skeptical of the work of Mann, Jones, Hanson, Schmidt and others, I do not deny that there is the potential for a human influence on climate. Where I am skeptical, is with the details of that influence, and its scale relative to natural influences. There is significant room for disagreement here that has been inappropriately suppressed by Nature, the mass media and the climate scientists. These details matter. If the climate scientists are now signaling a willingness to engage in this discussion, to open their lab books to demonstrate how and why they have modified temperature data, and to listen to points of view from other interested individuals with useful expertise, our understanding of climate and man’s role in it will be immensely improved.
Posted by: David N | January 21, 2010, 1:06 pm 1:06 pm
The problems faced by climatologists closely match the problems faced by evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, geologists and cosmologists as creationists distort their scientific research and scientific arguments on behalf of denying science on behalf of their ideology.
There is a certain segment of the population who will refuse to accept the conclusions of science under any and all circumstances. Such people are beyond reach and lost in their irrationality.
I’d suggest bypassing them and moving ahead but unfortunately pollution industries making billions of dollars can manipulate politics and public perception a lot more effectively than fundamentalist Christians. For that reason pollution continues and humankind’s tragic fate becomes sealed.
Posted by: dmathew1 | January 21, 2010, 5:53 pm 5:53 pm
dmatthew1:
Wow. You started well–I thought you might be going with the very astute observation that disciplines such as geology and evolutionary biology share a common problem with climatology in that they are all observational rather than experimental sciences. But alas, no. Instead you took the belief route. “My belief system is stronger than your belief system. I believe in science and that other ‘segment of the population’ is simply too stupid to believe.”
As a practicing scientist, I can assure you that science is often wrong. It is not a belief system. It is a method that relies on the ability to prove an idea is NOT true. Belief has no place in science. Evidence is the only currency, and the sad truth is that the climate science represented by the CRU bunch has been involved in counterfeiting that currency. We call it data fabrication or falsification. The evidence is tainted.
You are welcome to your irrational fears of 1) people who have different beliefs than you do, 2) Religion, 3) Industry that provides you with energy and consumer goods, and 4) humankind. But they really have nothing to do with this topic.
The “overwhelming” evidence in favor of human generated global warming is simply not there, despite what many might “believe”.
Posted by: David N | January 21, 2010, 11:55 pm 11:55 pm
“Climate science, like any active field of research, has some major gaps in understanding”.
Yes, and we don’t stop the progress of our entire civilization for the nutty ideas from other fields that can’t be objectively defended.
“So how can researchers honestly describe the uncertainty in their work without it being misconstrued?”
I guess they could start by not telling everybody else how to live and not being so transparently condescending and hypocritical. After that they could start working on understanding exactly what the uncertainties really are and publish the derivation, methodology, raw input data, and results of their error analysis in a larger body of work that includes a complete verification and validation effort of their simulation effort to date. They could also document which known atmospheric, oceanic, and geologic thermochemical reactions are, and are not, currently being modeled.
Posted by: Ralph | January 22, 2010, 11:38 am 11:38 am
A a lot of you skeptics are missing the larger point. Even if there is plenty of room for doubt that human greenhouse gas emissions are the source of the increase in temperature, it’s clear that waiting for all of the evidence to come in will make it too late to do anything about it.
Ask yourself, if there is even a 1 in 3 chance that vast swaths of the planet will be uninhabitable in 50 years if we don’t change our ways, is it worth changing our ways?
I say it is. 33% risk of mass starvation and warfare due to mass migration and inability to grow enough food is too high for me to accept. Even 20% is too high. I think that the certainty of human-caused global warming on the part of scientists is far higher than either of these numbers.
We don’t have anywhere else to go but this rock we’re on now. I’m all for people living the way they please until it starts hurting everyone else. Then the rest of us have every right to tell others how to live. Is it really going to kill us to be more efficient? These are values we should already have. People in developed nations are shamefully wasteful and we use far more resources than we truly need even just to be comfortable.
Posted by: Shannon W | January 22, 2010, 5:47 pm 5:47 pm
A lot of true believers miss the point that artificially raising a developed country’s energy prices will cause mass starvation in poor countries that depend on aid for food, medicine, and agricultural development.
Believers also seem incapable of convincing China and India to participate in “saving the world from climate change”. So what’s their endgame plan; war with China and India to force them to give up oil and coal? If climate zealots believe the world in such immediate danger that they have the right to force others to live by their rules, this is not an unreasonable question.
Meanwhile, climate change researchers have had decades and billions of dollars to make their case by publishing the details of their computer models, input data, error propagation analyses, and validation procedures in way that would make their work reproducible. And what has been the result of this money and effort? The emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Center are the result.
I submit that over zealous climate “control” policy is as much a danger to peace, human life, and civilization itself as the still hypothetical man made climate change.
There are many good reasons to work on new energy sources, but climate change hysteria isn’t one of them.
Posted by: Ralph | January 25, 2010, 10:37 pm 10:37 pm
Unless the human species traveled here and ,terra formed this planet. We are only a natural process of this planets evolution.Go sit on the moon.Look at our planet and tell me what process occurring is not a natural process of this planets evolution? There is only one answer.NONE. Planets are born and planets die. Get over this we can save the planet BC. We would be better off planning our exodus from here before it’s too late.
Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Nichols | January 27, 2010, 7:41 am 7:41 am
Oil will not last forever, just admit
that one undenighable fact…oil and
gas will run out some day soon.
Then what…buy solar panels from China..
We need to be first at something..
We need to lead not play catch up.
Taxes and fees are a part of doing business..(the lower the better but still necessary)
Polluting for profit is easy…doing the
right thing is hard..
Posted by: blackie | January 28, 2010, 2:29 pm 2:29 pm
No, oil and gas won’t last for ever. And the relevance that fact has to the accuracy of global warming models: none.
I’m all for development of new energy sources, but strangling economic expansion on the basis of hysterical global warming claims will do nothing but slow their development. That sort of emotional pollution of politics and dilution of the scientific method only makes the task more difficult.
Posted by: Ralph | January 29, 2010, 2:39 pm 2:39 pm
My own view is that a perfectly reasonable theory based on known science grew into certainty in the minds of the leading AGW scientists despite a failure to find any objective proof. Having spent, in some cases over thirty years, researching and looking for physical proof without finding any, but utterly convinced that the theory was correct and that humanity faced near total destruction, they began to select the data that agreed with their theory, saw this as ‘proof’ they were correct and continued in the same manne
Posted by: Acai Optimum | January 29, 2010, 11:52 pm 11:52 pm
Many of these responses reflect, from both sides, the emotional approach rather than any evidence-based one. Of course, that’s to be expected: if one can’t kill the messenger, then killing the messenger is a gratifying substitute.
Even if climate change of any type is not significantly influenced by us, we still need to address the problems of pollution. The science underlying *its* contribution to health problems (as well as other problems) is *not* in doubt, except, maybe, by the tobacco companies and those involved in oil and coal. I laugh (hollowly) every time I read or hear “clean coal.” Yeah, apparently the *best* technology we currently have let’s “only” about 10% slip by the capture-and-store part of it. Even the mining process is bad; ever hear of “black lung disease,” sometimes called “the miner’s lament”? Oh, I know, I know — that’s another lie perpetrated by those pesky greenies.
Wish they’d let the Father, a coal miner, know it was all just a lying joke as he lay dying years ago. . . .
Posted by: MekhongKurt | February 2, 2010, 2:55 pm 2:55 pm
These skeptics are not skeptical at all, they are flippantly and ignorantly dismissive. They show no understanding for the scientific process whatsoever.
Posted by: d | February 25, 2010, 5:47 pm 5:47 pm