GLOBE Scientists' Blog

By Dr. Robert Cahalan, NASA Scientist for GLOBE Student Research Campaign on Climate

News media recently dubbed “Climategate” the release of a group of private emails between climate scientists in England and the United States that contained discussion that was interpreted by some news sources as manipulation of the data to produce a desired outcome.  These communications were taken from a server at the University of East Anglia, from an archive of a research group headed by Phil Jones, a well-known climate scientist.  The emails were intended to be private, but contained content labeled by some as professional cheating.  A summary of the Climategate scandal is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

These emails contained negative comments about the research of certain “climate skeptics” such as Professor Patrick Michaels, a scientist who has consistently disagreed with the views of the Climategate emailers about global warming.

Labeling the purloined emails and their interpretation as “Climategate” suggests a parallel with the “Watergate” scandal of the 1970’s, a break-in to the headquarters of a United States political party, housed in the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC. That release of private records led to the resignation of the person the hackers had been trying to support, Richard Nixon, then President of the United States.  However, rather than compare Climategate to Watergate, as the media has, we might compare it to a scientific scandal, one that happened in the early 1700’s, nearly 300 years ago, namely Isaac Newton’s claim to be the inventor of calculus, against the counter-claims of a widely known mathematics Professor, Gottfried Leibniz.  For simplicity, and with some irony, we’ll label this older scandal “Calculusgate.” A nice discussion of this controversy is online on Wikipedia. Quoting from that Wikipedia article as we find it today, 15 December, 2009:  “… a bias favoring Newton tainted the whole affair from the outset. The Royal Society set up a committee to pronounce on the priority dispute, in response to a letter it had received from Leibniz. That committee never asked Leibniz to give his version of the events. The report of the committee, finding in favor of Newton, was written by Newton himself and published as ‘Commercium Epistolicum’ (mentioned above) early in 1713. But Leibniz did not see it until the autumn of 1714.   The prevailing opinion in the eighteenth century was against Leibniz (in Britain, not in the German-speaking world). Today the consensus is that Leibniz and Newton independently invented and described the calculus in Europe in the 17th century.”

At first sight, there appears to be a strong parallel between “Climategate” and “Calculusgate.”  That is, there developed a strong consensus led by the “establishment” that the truth about the origin of calculus was that Newton was the sole inventor, while Leibniz simply complained about Newton’s lack of rigor, and tried to push his own notation, and agenda.  In this, the Royal Society of London served as the “establishment” much like today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was anointed by the establishment with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.  Isaac Newton himself chaired the Royal Society study that issued a report that declared Newton himself to be the sole creator of calculus, without serious review of the claims of Leibniz, whom we might call the “calculus skeptic.”  The parallel here is that Phil Jones, former head of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, appears to have been “cooking the books” to make it appear that his claims of global warming are the correct ones, without serious consideration of “climate skeptics” like Patrick Michaels and others that he was criticizing in the ClimateGate emails.  The emails seem to indicate that Jones and his colleagues even considered forcing out Journal editors that weren’t sympathetic to his research. So, whom should we believe, Newton or Leibniz?  Jones or Michaels?

But this Calculusgate analogy, like the Watergate analogy, is far from perfect. Climategate involved a group secretly hacking into nonpublic computers to purloin private data, which is?itself a crime. In that sense, Climategate is more like Watergate than Calculusgate, and perhaps like Watergate it could backfire on the hackers. Keep watching the news to see. Also, Newton’s scandalous behavior did not negate his fundamental contributions to science.  Indeed, Newton is still considered a towering figure in physics, having developed the basic laws of force and motion, light and gravitation. But Leibniz is also now viewed with reverence. Newton and Leibniz are both considered constructive pioneers in the development of calculus during the 18th century. Their different approaches are each considered to have been useful in different applications, now that the passage of time has led to a more balanced perspective.

However, the reputations of Jones and Michaels may not turn out to have equal luster after the coming century.  Each represents alternative views about what will happen to global climate in the coming 21st century.  Jones and IPCC forecast a steady continued warming at a rate primarily determined by the rate of humanity’s continued use of fossil fuels, and a resulting steady decrease in global ice volume, and rise in sea level.  Michaels and other non-establishment climate skeptics forecast no steady warming, but temporary warming alternating with periods of cooling, with the periods of warmth and coolness primarily determined by non-human natural changes in the Sun’s brightness, in volcanic eruptions, and in natural transfers of heat within the climate system.  It is likely that only one of these views will prove correct.  If the skeptics are correct, there is nothing that mankind can do but wait, and watch.  If Jones and the IPCC establishment are correct, mankind is increasingly becoming the main player in the drama of the global climate, and may not simply stand by, waiting and watching, but may agree on long-term policies that might reduce the rate and magnitude of the warming, and the resulting ice melt, and the ultimate height of the rising sea level.  It is important that you, all of us, decide soon which of these alternative viewpoints to take as your working hypothesis about climate change, and choose to act accordingly.

Science is “testing ideas using observations” (R. P. Feynman.)  This is an objective approach to learning about the world.  But one scientist cannot make all observations needed to test each scientific idea or hypothesis.  Therefore, many of our scientific opinions are based on which scientists we choose to trust. How do you decide whom to trust?  Of course, that’s an issue in much of our lives, not only in science.  We don’t trust when there’s evidence of a “cover-up.”  We demand “transparency” in our governments, our businesses, and most of all, our personal relationships.  Scientists rely on personal relationships as much as anyone else.  Science relies on evidence and direct observations as much as possible, but as a practical matter, science must also rely on trust, and on good judgment about who to trust.

So science needs both trust, and skepticism. Science differs from pure skepticism, and from other philosophical approaches to knowledge, in its emphasis on observations, and on the process of developing and testing hypotheses.  Science encourages skepticism, but goes beyond skepticism.  It encourages development of alternative hypotheses, and values only those hypotheses capable of being tested by new observations, perhaps requiring new technology.  Climate science is not purely an experimental science, where we can decide the big questions with a few well-chosen experiments.  It is an observational science, in which we are living inside our own global experiment, and must adapt to the climate as we attempt to better understand it.  Our Earth’s climate is itself the experiment that matters most.  You cannot make all the observations needed to make up your mind about what is causing climate change.  But you can talk to your neighbors, to your grandparents, to your colleagues across our planet, and you can read what the experts write, and decide for yourself who is most reliable. Your decisions about our future climate will hopefully be as well informed as possible. Our future climate may depend on that. That is why your participation in GLOBE matters.

Can you think of examples in your own experience when you became less trustful of someone?  More trustful?  What led to changes in your trust?  How do you decide who or what to believe?  Do you base your beliefs mostly on what your friends tell you, or what you read, or on your own observations?  Why do you think the media labeled this incident “Climategate”? What do you think news media in 1700 might have called the “Newton-Leibniz” scandal? To see how one organization responded to Climategate, read this “statement on climate change”:

especially the section entitled “How will climate change in the future?”  Then read the organization’s reasons for not altering their climate change statement after “Climategate” which the organization refers to as the “CRU Hacking Incident”:

What do you think about this organization’s reasons for not altering their “statement on climate change” after the news about Climategate?  In particular, discuss these statements with your friends, family, teachers and other students:

• “As with any scientific assessment, it is likely to become outdated as the body of scientific knowledge continues to grow, and the current statement is scheduled to expire in February 2012 if it is not replaced by a new statement prior to that.”
• “The beauty of science is that it depends on independent verification and replication as part of the process of confirming research results.”
• “Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.”
• “The AMS encourages ethical behavior in all aspects of science and has established a record of affirming the value of scientists presenting their research results “objectively, professionally, and without sensationalizing or politicizing the associated impacts.”

Write several sentences to describe your own policy about how to decide about the truth of scientific claims.  Consider both the case when you have made some of the observations yourself, and the case when you are mainly relying on the observations of others.  Share your policy with your teachers and classmates, and see how your policy compares with theirs.