http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4338343.html?page=1
What East Anglia's E-mails Really Tell Us About Climate Change
PM guest analyst Peter Kelemen, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explains what stolen e-mails from climate scientists corresponding with East Anglia University tell us about global warming—and what they don't.
By Peter Kelemen
Published on: December 1, 2009
In the past two weeks, scientists like myself have been gripped by news of the theft and online release of more than a decade of e-mails from one of the world's leading centers for climate-change research, the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia. During these same weeks, world political leaders have been preparing for a climate summit in Copenhagen and a new study has indicated that a major ice sheet in eastern Antarctica, previously thought to be stable, is in fact losing mass. But those developments have been clouded by the stolen e-mails and what they may imply about how research into human-induced global warming is carried out.
Among the hundreds of e-mails, 10 to 20 messages seem to indicate that scientists at CRU and their correspondents considered deleting information requested by critics in the context of British and American freedom of information laws, and in at least two separate cases discussed how to have associate editors of peer-reviewed journals removed from their posts because they accepted critics' papers for publication. We do not know the detailed context of these messages, nor do we know if ideas discussed in these e-mails were actually implemented. Furthermore, though CRU has confirmed that most of the e-mails are genuine, some of them could have been forged or altered. Nevertheless, I think it is important for scientists to clearly state that if basic data were withheld, or if there was unprofessional tampering with the peer-review process, we do not condone these acts. It is equally essential to emphasize that alleged problems with a few scientists' behavior do not change the consensus understanding of human-induced, global climate change, which is a robust hypothesis based on well-established observations and inferences.
I am not a climate science specialist and I can't claim to represent the wider science community. However, I am a geologist with a Ph.D. and 30 years of research experience. As I became personally involved in research on CO2 capture and storage over the past four years, I have taken an increasing interest in the underlying observations that have led the great majority of scientists to conclude that action is necessary to reduce and mitigate CO2 emissions.
Open Access to Data
In tracking news reports and other commentary online, I have noticed vigorous exaggeration of the import of the stolen messages by global warming critics, and a relative silence on the part of the wider science community. But on the climate science commentary site RealClimate.org, I saw a statement from the moderators that "science doesn't work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn't a useful theory because Newton was a nice person." Such statements—while true—could lead readers to conclude that the apparent misconduct revealed in the stolen e-mails is normal, and within the bounds of ordinary scientific discussion. I believe that would be a mistake.
It is often said that no one should see the ugly reality of how politics or sausages are made. But that's not true in the world of scientific research. Transparency is the goal, and in my experience it is also the norm. With regard to sharing data, my view is that data gathered by public monitoring organizations (e.g., the National Weather Service) should be made available to anyone as soon as technically feasible. Data gathered as part of government-funded research grants to research scientists should probably be available within two to four years even if nothing is published, and should definitely be available upon request as soon as work is published that relies on these data. Now, in practice, there are all sorts of glitches and inefficiencies in data sharing, and apparently some subset of the climate data used at CRU are confidential. However, if researchers actively tried to avoid disclosing basic data to their critics, as one might infer from several e-mails, I believe this was unethical. In one case, in which someone apparently advised deleting e-mails that might be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request in the U.K., it looks as though scientists may have broken the law, or at least seriously considered doing so. If so, this is not "normal" in scientific circles and it certainly is not acceptable.
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