A Brief History…

(Crossposted)

By Bradley J. Fikes

The leak of Climategate emails is part of a campaign of “vilification” waged by skeptical bloggers against climate science, influential climate researcher Gerald R. North said Friday.

Slide from Gerald North’s presentation at Friday AAAS panel

North, of Texas A&M University, was part of a panel on Climategate and the proper conduct of scientific research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual convention, held this year in San Diego.

North said skeptical bloggers have harassed climate scientists with demands for data, assisted in their efforts at times by “energy-friendly members of Congress”.
But despite blogger harassment and potential misuse of data, North said scientists should be open and share their data, even with nonscientists, as part of good scientific practice and building public trust.
North defended global warming research as by and large accurate, repeating highlights of a report from the National Academy of Sciences, produced by a team chaired by North. Condensed copies of the report, “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years,” were distributed at the panel discussion.
North said global temperatures in the last few decades are the highest they’ve been in 700 years and that it is “plausible” that the warmth exceeded that of any time in the last 1,000 years.
But these scientists have been troubled by unfair attacks and repeated demands for data from various blogger skeptics, North said, whom he did not name.
The “hacked emails” that triggered Climategate and the investigations of climate scientists Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain and Michael Mann of Penn State University are “phase 2″ of the “vilification” according to a slide North showed.
North said climate scientists face an “asymmetry” in responding to attacks from blogger skeptics, because the attacks were outside the norms of scientific criticism, including demands that the global warming researchers commit suicide.
“That is a big challenge for us,” North said, because researchers are uncertain of how to respond to blogger requests and challenges.
“Sometime you answer, and you think you’re being helpful to someone, and they turn right around and do harm,” North said. “Should we share data with persons … who might misuse the data? I’m inclined to make everything available.”
Other panelists were noted evolutionary biologist Francisco J. Ayala, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at Harvard, and Philip A. Sharp, a Nobel prize-winning geneticist.
Jasanoff devoted most of her talk to describing the context of science in society, and how that relationship has changed.
While once scientists could reasonably demand to be left alone, massive public funding of science makes that no longer an option, she said.
Jasonoff only touched lightly over the Climategate emails, which cover a 13-year span up to November, 2009.
“We know they’re 10 years old,” Jasanoff said. “How do you make use of 10-year-old stuff?”
The statement about the emails’ age parallels similarly incorrect statements made by former Democratic vice president Al Gore.
The panel did not include any global warming skeptics.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has a blog post on the discussion. As an AGW believer who says we “stand to get fried” if we don’t act, Mooney’s opinion is quite different from mine. I think AGW science need to be re-studied and errors and bias need to be removed. Some of it may be true, but as we have seen in the last few months, AGW activists have made major claims that turn out to be ungrounded.
In particular, the fad of blaming every climate trend on CO2 is distorting science. In some of the most spectacular examples of the supposed effects of AGW, CO2 is at best a minor player. The main culprits are local, not global.
Mooney writes: “I get the sense that scientists and their institutions are so concerned over what has occurred in the past few months that there are going to be very real changes made, so as to ensure that better defenses of science are mounted in the future.”

I hope these “better defenses” emphasize openness and transparency, and promptly admitting and correcting errors with humility and without anger or defensiveness. If they are just more politicized advocacy efforts that don’t take skeptical views seriously, the efforts will fail.

Let’s have a mature discussion of differences of opinion on global warming science, and leave out the politicized attacks and name-calling.

Tags: global warming

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