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Climategate’s culture

British MPs are concerned about the way climate scientists have worked, but not about their results

Mar 31st 2010 | From The Economist print edition

The University of East Anglia’s climate scientists, and indeed the results of climate science in general, are OK. The practice and culture of climate science, and the procedures of the university, are not. That is the conclusion of a report on the “climategate” e-mails by the MPs on the Science and Technology Committee of Britain’s House of Commons, the first of three different reports on the subject expected over the next few months. The e-mails, apparently stolen, have been seized on as evidence of various types of dishonesty and skulduggery in climate science since their release onto the internet late last year.

The MPs’ most striking prescription is that climate science should hold itself, and be held to, a higher standard than heretofore when it comes to openness and transparency. When giving evidence to the committee, Phil Jones, the head of the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the e-mails came, said that freely disclosing data and the computer codes used to work with them “has not been standard practice” in the field. “If it is not standard practice how can the science progress?” asked Graham Stringer, a member of the committee. “Maybe it should be standard practice,” replied Dr Jones, “but it is not standard practice across the subject.” The MPs concluded that in a field as significant and important to policy as climate change this was not good enough. They are calling for data and methodological workings to be made openly available. On occasions when data are provided to scientists on the basis that they will not be further promulgated (as with some of the data Dr Jones used from meteorological agencies in other countries) that should be made clear, with all requests redirected to the relevant data-holders.

Many climate scientists will claim that the field is already highly transparent in these regards, and it is true that much data is freely available. But Dr Jones’s position on what has, in the past, constituted standard practice suggests that such claims to transparency have to be judged case by case.

In remarks he made at the launch of the report, the committee’s chairman, Phil Willis, said the current “culture of non-disclosure” was “reprehensible”. Evan Harris, another member of the committee, was quick to point out that that is not a word used in the report proper, which is supportive of Dr Jones and his colleagues: Dr Harris himself successfully moved an amendment to the report which said that, on the basis of the evidence seen, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact”, a conclusion that the university particularly welcomed. The report says that on the evidence the MPs saw no reason to think the scientists dishonest or their science besmirched, or to doubt the consensus among climate scientists that humans are warming the world and will warm it further. The MPs accepted that the much-blogged-about use of “trick”, when applied to a way of representing data, and “hide the decline”, as applied to a set of data in which tree rings that were held to be useful at some times were held to be useless at others, were in no way evidence of obfuscation. And it sympathised with the scientists’ frustration at having to deal with numerous freedom of information requests from people who the scientists believed wanted to obstruct their work.

Frustration aside, the committee deemed the approach which CRU took to at least some of these requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) unacceptable. But its criticisms over prima facie evidence that the act had been breached were aimed more at the university authorities than at the scientists. The university, it found, had supported the scientists in non-disclosure, rather than helping them follow the act’s procedures. If a small number of FOIA requests had been dealt with properly early on, it seems possible that the large number of requests last year (over 100) might have been averted, or could, perhaps, have been rejected as vexatious. The committee also chided the office of the information commissioner for going beyond what it could say for sure when it told the Sunday Times that the act had been broken but that it could do nothing about it because six months had elapsed. And it took the opportunity for a dig at the government, which said last summer that there was no reason to see that six-month limit as posing problems. It does here.

A full account of whether the terms of the act were actually broken, the MPs said, should come from either the information commissioner or from the “Independent Climate Change Email Review” that the university has set up, and which will produce one of the next two reports on the matter. The other will be from a “Scientific Appraisal Panel” with members chosen by the Royal Society. The e-mail review panel will look further at evidence for manipulation or suppression of data, for poor practice with respect to peer review, at attempts to circumvent FOIA and at how the e-mails got out in the first place. The appraisal panel will look to see whether any of the issues raised invalidate the scientific papers produced at CRU over the past decades.

The membership of both panels has been criticised for partiality by various blogs taking a close and unfriendly interest in the matter, pointing out, for example, that the chairman of the appraisal panel, Lord Oxburgh, has investments in clean energy companies (he was also, briefly, the chairman of Shell), and that some of the panels’ members have pre-existing commitments to the consensus view among climate scientists, or academic links to the CRU scientists. Their criticisms were taken up by Mr Stringer, who in the end voted against the report as released.

Mr Stringer moved to have the report urge that it is “vital that these two inquiries have at least one member each who is a reputable scientist, and is sceptical of anthropogenic climate change.” The rest of the committee voted this suggestion down, arguing that scepticism was a proper attitude expected of all, rather than the badge of a preceding conviction. Steve McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant whose blog, Climate Audit, has been the source for much detailed critique of climate reconstructions, including those of CRU, might, though not an academic, be the sort of person Mr Stringer is thinking of. For his part, Mr McIntyre says that his preference would not be for someone sceptical of anthropogenic global warming per se, but rather for someone familiar with the detailed issues that he and others have raised—or, better yet, for a judge.