"Climategate": business as usual for science

There has been no little amount of shrill hysteria published about "Climategate", of late.  Usually responsible adults have been falling over themselves to criticise the scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).  All of this because those scientists happened to write some poorly-documented code, and express frustration amongst themselves in private emails.  This behaviour has been seized upon by a number of commentators, and portrayed as some kind of 'smoking gun' that reveals a worldwide conspiracy among climate change researchers, and as evidence that the whole scenario is a lie.  


Those commentators are wrong, of course.  It is not just that their logic is broken: even if everything the CRU ever did was bogus - which it surely isn't - there is plenty of other evidence for climate change and its causes.  Nor is it simply because conspiracies of that size are rather implausible.  Neither is it that if the actual truth about climate change was just common sense, as they claim, more people - including governmental science funders, presumably - would see straight through it.  They are not even wrong because the thousands of emails and megabytes of data of Climategate have been available for weeks now and, if there was fraud to be found amongst them, surely the large numbers of 'independent', yet completely invested eyes that are determined to find such evidence in there would have found it.  But I suppose there's still time for that.


No, they are wrong because the behaviour seen at the CRU is, if we're honest about it, the way Science gets done, because it's done by people.


Most bloggers and commentators on the issue appear to lack a scientific background.  This places them short of the expertise or experience to make a credible judgement on the nature of the Climategate emails.  A large proportion of the pieces I read about the issue (and it's an unspoken assumption of even more commentators) consider explicitly that Science should be somehow 'pure', completely dispassionate, and conducted by individuals who can separate their humanity and emotions from their work under all circumstances.  It's a lovely ideal, and I wish that I and my colleagues lived up to it.  But in reality it's an unreasonable expectation that holds the CRU (and the rest of us) up to an unattainable standard.  As scientists we should certainly strive for perfection, but it is no failing to know that perfection is a target, and not a destination.  


In fact, I recognise pretty much every allegedly suspicious element of Climategate in my own, rather modest, work and that of about every other scientist I know or have met.  If I start writing about the poor standard of comments, documentation and code in some very widely-used open-source scientific applications, and software for very important publications, I may not stop.  


I can also - and I expect every other scientist can, too - produce a list of primary research papers in my field that I simply do not believe.  They may be the result of inexpert work or self-delusion, sometimes they may be over-reaching to convince a funder, or they may be deliberate fraud.  I can, and as before I think all scientists likely can, name groups and individuals whose work I do not automatically trust.  We all have opinions about which journals are 'easy' or lax.  I can also point to vituperative emails sent between researchers directly when they disagree, and to the authors of - in my eyes dispassionate - research articles by individuals who feel somehow slighted.


Some others may even say the same kinds of negative things about me or my work.   I might even have expressed thoughts like that in the odd personal email, myself.  But I do not say these things because I dislike individuals personally, or object to certain lines of work being done.  Science is done by many people, with a range of levels of competency and thoroughness, and in the end scientists are human, and we talk about these subjects in human ways.  Critics should perhaps bear that in mind when interpreting the Climategate emails, and recall the old adage that "those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them made".  The same is possibly true for scientific knowledge.