Climategate: No Conspiracy, Just Bad Science

The leaked documents from the Climate Research Unit in England do not prove that global warming is a hoax, but merely that many researchers are abandoning the scientific method to promote their side in the debate.

The scandal around the leaking of documents from the Climate Research Unit in England is indeed a big deal, although not necessarily in the way some conservatives seem to think (no, the emails do not prove that the global warming is a hoax or that there’s a huge conspiracy to create a socialist global government – although they strongly suggest that the CRU scientists may have done a lot of shoddy work). David Frum's analogy with James Watson is not particularly apt since here we have not just some unethical behavior, but serious violations of scientific procedures. Those violations have already been extensively commented on by others (in my professional opinion all results directly and indirectly based on the dumped raw data are scientifically invalid, and the IPCC scientists should now do a lot of work to excise all tainted CRU results from their materials).

However, I think there’s more to the scandal and I can’t help thinking about another analogy (albeit a very imperfect one, since the anti-global warming theory actually has a real scientific basis) – with T.D. Lysenko. Even before the scandal we could observe the following important parallels (listed in the increasing order of troublesomeness):

• Widespread use of anecdotal data (in fairness though, both sides are guilty of it in the climate debate)
• The use of the fierce urgency of now (collective farmers/polar bears are starving!) as an argument to end the scientific debate and go for action (it’s funny how the people who claim we have only a few months or a few years to save the planet never argue for short-circuiting the FDA drug approval process to save patients suffering from horrible diseases – not that we should not follow the proper scientific process in testing new drugs)
• A very convenient match between the theory and the ideology of its proponents (in fairness, some anti-global warming opposition is ideological too)
• Government(s) fully embracing one of the sides in the debate
• Questioning the motives of detractors (in both cases the opponents are denounced as “capitalist agents”) rather than addressing their arguments on the merits (in fairness, both sides are guilty of it in the climate debate)

Now, thanks to those stolen emails, we also know that just like Lysenko, the CRU scientists did some hanky-panky with their data and used “administrative” methods and bullying to deal with dissenters. They also expressed a desire to use violence against an opponent and joy at the death of another one – here they fell far short of Comrade Lysenko who got a whole bunch of his opponents executed. But I’m afraid we may yet see them catching up a bit. European politicos routinely call global warming skeptics “criminals” and “enemies of mankind”. There have been even some calls to actually criminalize global warming denial. Unfortunately, nowadays we cannot dismiss that as some overheated idle talk, since countries across Europe are in fact busy criminalizing anything that offends Muslims (some celebrities like Brigitte Bardot have already been convicted), the country preparing to celebrate the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta soon, earlier this year declared an American talk show host persona non grata and physically expelled an arriving MP from a fellow EU member (who, moreover, came at the invitation of their own MPs!), Canada just recently tried to prosecute Mark Steyn for the unspeakable crime of writing a book on demographics, and humanities departments on American campuses tend to be quite intolerant, although the First Amendment so far saves us from the worst excesses in the rest of the West.

Once again, all these parallels do not prove or disprove anything, but we must be vigilant in defense of the scientific method (after all, it is one of the biggest achievements of the Western civilization that conservatives are so keen to preserve). Climate science is, unfortunately, not the only danger area. If this recent article is correct, Lysenkoism may once again strike against genetics. Some soon to be completed studies will violate a lot of PC pieties (like “race is a social construct”) and we may yet be treated to a tawdry spectacle of some segments of the religious right and secular left uniting to denounce the theory of evolution (albeit for different reasons). Furthermore, we may again see the bullying of editors and other underhanded methods (the Economist article already states that “American bioscience will prove too politically squeamish to fund such studies”), and in some countries there may well be calls for the invocation of “hate speech” laws. Conservatives should be ready to stand up for genuine science without waiting for some new leaked emails.