Scientific Agenda

So . . . the report has come in and it was found that the "climategate" researchers had not done anything too wrong. All of the hubbub about manipulated results and bad science proved to be not entirely warranted. I know that it's hard to believe that the newspapers would make something into a bigger deal than it was, but I guess we just have to consider that possibility.

But this issue does highlight an important point that is central to this debate. The report on the conduct of Phil Jones and his colleagues in East Anglia found that they did, in fact, act contrary to the spirit of scientific discovery. By supressing dissent and selectively presenting data, they made it clear that they were more interested in providing the perception that they were right than in providing hard evidence.

If the findings out of East Anglia were so convincing, why wouldn't the scientists there welcome dissenting opinion? Why the schadenfreude at the death of a climate-change skeptic (over e-mail, no less! I can picture it: "Dr. Skeptic died - LMAO"). The problem here wasn't (only) bad science, it was science with a political agenda. Just like how the science of evolution has been taken over by politics, reducing it to a with-us-or-against-us debate, climate change science has been made into a political hot button. And this makes it difficult to do good science.

This topic, whether you are a believer or a skeptic/heretic/unsure individual, has profound implications for the future. And I'm not talking about snow-less winters or summer heat waves (I could do with less shoveling in winter), but rather policy implications and money, tons of money, that will be devoted to this issue. Therefore the fact that it is oversimplified into a religious cause is troubling, because what we need is good data. Good data isn't always crystal clear, incontrovertible, and 100% right or wrong. No one cause determines an effect (at least not in a complex system like this).

So when data is cherry-picked to make the "hockey stick" graph of rising temperatures, I am concerned. When the review process for articles is hijacked such that contrary findings are supressed, I am concerned. I would rather know less about what is going on but be sure in my lack of knowledge than to supposedly know more but have serious doubts about the veracity of the claims. All good science is couched in debate. Scientific research was once defined to me as a conversation, where one researcher says "this is how I see things, and here is some support for my argument," and another says, "well, I see things this way, and here's my support." A one-sided conversation where the other person made mute does not create reliable findings.

So while the report has found that the East Anglia researchers may not have done bad scientists, their agenda makes them bad scientists.