The revelation that scientists appear to have been manipulating climate change data to boost the case for international action, while deliberately sidelining research that still questions the real effect of human-produced greenhouse gases, could not have come at a more difficult moment.
Next Monday world leaders sit down in Copenhagen for 11 days of negotiations to see if they can produce a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which will oblige countries to adopt binding limits on their carbon gas emissions.
The United Nations climate change body is urgently examining thousands of e-mails and other documents, apparently hacked from the system used by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. The messages are important because of the CRU’s acknowledged key contribution to the whole climate-change debate. They seem to show that far from using all available data to help the CRU scientists build their models of radical environmental transformation, those data that did not fit their assumption the world is on a downward spiral toward global warming, were discarded. Equally disturbing, it appears that research by other scientists that contradicted their own hypothesis, was deliberately marginalized and attempts were made to discredit it.
To put it mildly, this is not the strict scientific method which is supposed to guide any research, however abstruse and certainly not a project that has brought the world to the threshold of radically reordering its economic and indeed social priorities. If the compromising content in the CRU e-mails has not been misunderstood, as some of those directly involved are protesting that it has, then the consequences will be far-reaching. The whole climate change agenda will be thrown into disarray. If dishonesty is proven in just part of the massive environmental research effort, all of the conclusions of those other scientists who have investigated green house gas impacts, will be cast into doubt. It simply cannot be true that the entire scientific community has embarked upon a mammoth conspiracy. But in a subject so complex and specialized, can laymen judge between genuine and spurious research?
It may indeed be that carbon gas emissions are wreaking major climatic change. However, falsified research by just one part of the scientific establishment is very likely to compromise all the other research which has also focused on it.
It has been notable how some world leaders, who have nailed their political colors to climate change mitigation, have been wriggling awkwardly since news of the so-called “Climategate” e-mails broke.
British Minister Ed Milliband pronounced hopefully, “One string of e-mail does not undermine the global science on climate change”. Unfortunately, however, since those e-mails came from a respected scientific unit contributing significantly to the debate, that is precisely what it does. Milliband went on to protest that he was not a scientist and could, therefore, not really judge. Weasel words. He and many other world politicians are happily primed to present urgent science-based arguments at Copenhagen. Until the Climategate e-mails are properly investigated, should this important summit actually be going ahead?
