Book Highlights Amateur Sceptics Radically Empowered by the Internet

“With a heavily politicised issue like climate change – and one in which stalled action may lead to disastrous consequences – there is a huge risk in growing over-focused on behind-the-scenes details of small corners of climate research to the detriment of the big picture. Global warming is real and human-caused, and no email can change that.” So writes Chris Mooney in his New Scientist review of “The Climate Files” by Fred Pearce.

Reviewed by New Scientists Issue 3 July 2010:

IN THE grand saga of political battles over climate research, there is no event more pivotal, or more damaging, than what has come to be called “climategate” – the late-2009 theft and exposure of a trove of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files, based on his 12-part investigative series for The Guardian newspaper in London, is the first book-length attempt to cover the furore.

Some scientists faulted the Guardian series when it appeared, and similar objections apply to this book. Pearce (who is a consultant for New Scientist) writes as though he is covering a real scandal, and takes a “pox on both houses” approach to the scientists who wrote the emails and the climate sceptics who hounded them endlessly – and finally came away with a massive PR victory. But that’s far too “balanced” an account.

In truth, climategate was a pseudo-scandal, and the worst that can be said of the scientists is that they wrote some ill-advised things. “I’ve written some pretty awful emails,” admitted Phil Jones, director of the CRU at the time. The scientists also resisted turning over their data when battered by requests for it – requests from climate sceptics who dominate the blogosphere and don’t play by the usual rules.

But there is nothing very surprising, much less scandalous, about such behaviour. Yes, a “bunker mentality” developed among the scientists; they were “huddling together in the storm”, in Pearce’s words. But there really was a storm. They were under attack. In this situation, the scientists proved all too human – not frauds, criminals or liars.

So why were their hacked emails such big news? Because they were taken out of context and made to appear scandalous. Pearce repeatedly faults the sceptics for such behaviour. Yet he too makes the scientists’ private emails the centrepiece of the story. Pearce’s investigations don’t show any great “smoking gun” offences by the scientists – yet he still finds fault. And who wouldn’t, when they can read their private comments in the heat of the battle? (I can’t help but wonder what Pearce might think if he had the sceptics’ private emails too.)

Pearce is an ace climate journalist, deeply conversant with every debate in the field going back several decades. This expertise, however, makes the arcane climategate emails a kind of kryptonite for him. Again and again, they drag Pearce into the weeds of complex technical arguments between scientists and their sceptic detractors. And so we plunge into debates about the validity of certain data from Chinese weather stations and about whether bristlecone pine tree rings show evidence of climate change. And this is precisely where the sceptics want journalists to go – into the weeds – because it confuses the public.

There is a place and time for hashing out these kinds of detail. But with a heavily politicised issue like climate change – and one in which stalled action may lead to disastrous consequences – there is a huge risk in growing over-focused on behind-the-scenes details of small corners of climate research to the detriment of the big picture. Global warming is real and human-caused, and no email can change that.

With a politicised issue like climate change there is a huge risk in growing over-focused on the minutiae

There are other important storylines here, though Pearce subordinates them to his email sleuthing. There’s the radical empowerment of amateur sceptics by the internet, which has crucially changed the dynamic between climate scientists and their attackers. There is scientists’ lack of preparedness for the kind of mud sceptics have learned to fling at them. And there’s the foolish bunker behaviour of the University of East Anglia as the crisis communications game played out in the media.

Climategate is certainly a story for our science-politicising times. But so is our failure to zoom out – way, way out – and understand it.

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist in Washington DC

Source: www.newscientist.com