Some unknown hackers did the deed. They revealed a ton of e-mails written by prominent climate scientists concerned about global warming, and while some of their remarks look very bad, the scientists are saying it is just a “smear campaign.” Others come to their defense, insisting the reaction to the material is far worse than anything the scientists said.
“It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science,” science historian Spencer Weart is quoted as saying in The Washington Post. “Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.”
With all due respect, you’ve got to wonder what cave Weart has been living in for the past decade or so.
Entirely new?
How about all the news stories, all the blogs, all the commentaries that have repeatedly pounded scientists skeptical that warming portends apocalypse, all the accusations that that they are nothing more than hired hands of evil corporate forces, the insistence that they are selling out humanity for lucre?
When I worked in Washington, I became acquainted with some of these people, such as Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist whose accomplishments are extraordinary, and Patrick Michaels, a climatologist and former research professor who has repeatedly shown how alarmists have failed to analyze data they themselves embrace with any particular acuity.
I am convinced these are honorable, decent men, and I have nothing but contempt for the personal attacks on them.
I am also put off by the chant that it’s chiefly the winning of grants that has motivated other scientists to express fear about warming. My guess is they are mostly persuaded by the evidence, but that something else is at work with some of them.
What’s disturbing is the tone some assume, the near certainty about something that remains in many ways speculative, the frustration with debate, the anger and the allegiance to remedies that could well do more harm than warming itself. This is not science, but ideology, even religion as some have said, and that’s what the e-mails tend to confirm, that what we have here is unbudging dogma.
None of the dozen or so accounts about the e-mails that I have read convinces me that we can now pronounce the human-caused, catastrophic warming theory a hoax. We can conclude, however, that some of these communications do show impatience with dialogue, more eagerness to win the argument and convince the public than to further explore various possibilities, a wish to keep information out of the hands of scientists who see the issue differently and a desire that these heretics no longer be heard.
“I simply can’t believe that there is a kind of Mafia that is trying to inhibit critical papers from being published,” said Mojib Latif, a climate researcher, as quoted in one news story.
Another scientist whose name had been abused in the e-mails, Hans von Storch, is quoted in another piece as saying of the e-mail writers that they “violated a fundamental principle of science” in trying to keep collected information from getting out, and that they “play science as a power game.”
The irony here is that these scientists, so determined that their faith carry the day, have in the end given the public some very good reasons to be doubters — and just as a world summit on climate change is coming up. If none of the much-abused skeptics are heard there, we should figure the exercise is one of creed writing, not of truth seeking, and be wary of acting on that creed.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
