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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.
Genetic modification (GM) of crops is an issue that stirs up deep feelings in many people. That scientists are now able to modify with exquisite precision the genetic material underlying our food is a fact that seems to generate fear in many. Yet the history of agriculture, and so of humanity, is one of our often haphazard manipulation of wild species.
Since the first deliberate planting of wild plants we have selected those traits that are pleasing or useful to us and discarded those that are not, by the by. Civilisation's existence is entirely dependent upon this capacity to manipulate our environment. If our ancestors had never done so, we would still be hunting and gathering. To deny this seems perverse; to object to it more perverse still. The successive differences between the technologies we have employed over the millennia: first noticing and choosing 'good' variants, through deliberate selective breeding, marker-based selection, leading now to the direct insertion of genetic material that enhances crop traits, are only differences of degree. It is ironic that the precision and accuracy of genetic manipulation is less likely to produce unwanted and unintended consequences for the resulting plant, than are the traditional methods that GM's opponents consider somehow more 'safe'. Nature's experimentation is wilder still.
You need only read the comments made by readers to Professor David Baulcombe's recent article in The Guardian, or any other similar opinion piece on that website to see how politically polarised the issue has become in the UK and Europe. This is a shame, for many reasons. There is a serious, objective case that GM may be one of a very few technologies that can offer substantial hope for food security worldwide, and particularly in developing nations (there are other issues, including the very nature of industrial agriculture, but I'm not focusing on those, here). The world's population is expected to approach 9bn, an increase of 2.6bn (40% of the current global population), by 2050. Almost all of this growth will take place in developing nations. Those developing nations are exactly the people that are most likely to have a high proportion of subsistence farming, and to be experiencing relatively greater pressures on their agricultural land as demand for food, and for urban and suburban development increases with population. They are the nations that could benefit most from a positive contribution of GM. This benefit would be very real, possibly meaning the difference between being able, and not being able, to feed millions and maybe billions of individuals.
Perhaps the greatest shame in the UK is that the debate we should be having about how best to develop and apply this technology for the good of ourselves and others has been confused and subverted, particularly by the media. It has become a debate about whether GM is 'moral', or 'good'. It may become impossible to have an objective, balanced public discussion of the issues, if the arguments become too firmly entrenched in ideology. As Prof. Baulcombe points out in his article, the perception that GM technology is but a tool for monopolistic agribusiness has tainted the public debate, and enabled lobbyists to create a situation in the UK in which only large, monopolistic agribusiness is realistically able to carry out this research. This may not be the best possible situation. Small companies, government and academic research departments - regardless of quality or insight - have been unable or unwilling to contribute to this research, either due to the resulting restrictive legislation, or vandalism of research sites.
Opening up the public debate will require an informed populace. That means education, and specifically scientific education. Unfortunately, recent budget cuts to science and education of £600m in the UK (less than 1% of the UK government's bank bail-out, but slightly more than is expected to be raised by a new tax on bankers' bonuses) seem to imply that investing in this education is not a priority for the government. Several recent mergers and closures of agricultural research sites in the UK do not bode well for essential capacity in this area, either. How will the situation change if we undervalue science education, and reduce the nation's ability to carry out the relevant research?
Adding to the worry about a public debate is that even those people with experience and influence in the area are prone to mistakes of reasoning when it comes to GM. In a recent letter to The Guardian, Professor J.T. Winkler, Director of the Nutrition Policy Unit at London Metropolitan University asserts that there are...
two basic types of GM. Agronomic GM seeks to improve the growing properties of the plant, for example making it weed- or pest-resistant. Nutritional GM seeks to improve the nutrient profile of the plant.
This is misleading in two ways. Firstly Prof. Winkler argues that GM crops are to be distinguished as 'agronomic' or 'nutritional' in terms of the kind of end use they see; i.e. whether the intention is to improve nutrition, or whether it is to improve the growing properties. This is a teleological argument that does not really distinguish between types of GM technology (e.g. gene silencing, the inclusion of genes from other strains of the same organism, or transgenics), but only its applications. The same GM technology can be used to either end: the inclusion of a set of genes in rice may be intended to improve drought-resistance ('agronomic'), or to enhance vitamin A production ('nutritional'). Any risks derive from the exact nature of the technology and its application, not the intention behind the application. If we are sensibly to discuss the risks, we cannot simply rely on distinguishing good intentions from bad.
Secondly, Prof. Winkler appears to believe that increasing the nutritional value of a single plant is 'better' than increasing the number of plants that can be grown. He is right to point out that what he calls 'nutritional GM' can be of benefit to millions of the world's poorest people, but he is remiss in not noting that simply growing enough food is a problem for many of the same people. That problem is not going to go away and is, as pointed out above, likely to become more significant for many more people.
That the government might rely on expert advice seems to be out of the question. So, if even the head of a university policy unit gets these issues confused, what hope do the rest of us have in a public debate?
I enjoy reading George Monbiot, though I don't always agree with him. In one of his recent articles for The Guardian he made the statement:
"If science is not transparent and accountable, it's not science."
But he's not correct.
Throughout history, much of the natural philosophy we now call 'Science' has been carried out for patronage, for industrial and military advantage, for payment or other personal gain, but only recently has it been done on a large scale for the sake of knowing, for the public good or, perhaps less altruistically, for the good of the state. The activity of discovering and explaining the universe and its mechanisms has, historically, rarely been separated from venal interests or interfering funders.
In some ways we have in the last few decades been living through a Golden Age of science in which there is substantial (if not adequate) state funding in most developed nations, and relatively little interference or steering from public funders. This has coloured some expectations of what science should be: independently-minded, free from financial shackles and interference by funders. But many patrons of science have expected and enforced secrecy, for fear they would lose their competitive advantage, or their entire business. Some of these eventually forwent secrecy for protection via patents and other mechanisms (but that's another post). Transparency and accountability was not always a feature of natural philosophy, and it is not always part of science, now.
Despite all the secrecy, the conflicting interests and the desire to please funders, science has continued to question the universe and receive the best answers available at the time. It did not matter which military studied ballistics, the results were the same. No matter who funds the study of a particular chemical synthesis, the results are the same. Eventually, someone noticed the link between smoking and lung cancer, despite tobacco industry suppression. Some details aside, the universe gives more or less the same answers regardless of who is asking the question, who pays the questioner, and who, if anyone, is told about the result. That a result is secret, or paid for, does not make it untrue or undiscoverable. Nor does it necessarily affect the validity of the science that was done.
An essential feature of science is that someone else could ask the same question and get the same answer; your secret is secret only for as long as no-one else asks the same question. Your answer, if obtained honestly, should be independent of commission or ideology.
Transparency and accountability are not essential features of science but they are highly desirable elements in the practice of science, and in policy-making, which is the point I would rather Monbiot had made.
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