On the Credibility of Climate Research, Part II:
Towards Rebuilding Trust
Judith
Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you
will. I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere
since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org
and the other at climateprogress.org.
Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the
diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite
interesting. Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of
different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the
collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate
them. I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this
important topic.
Losing the Public’s Trust
Climategate has now become broadened in scope to extend beyond the CRU
emails to include glaciergate and a host of other issues associated
with the IPCC. In responding to climategate, the climate research
establishment has appealed to its own authority and failed to
understand that climategate is primarily a crisis of trust.
Finally, we have an editorial published in Science on February 10 from Ralph
Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Science, that begins to
articulate the trust issue: “This
view reflects the fragile nature of trust between science and society,
demonstrating that the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists
can diminish the credibility of science as a whole. What needs to be
done? Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of
science and the personal behaviors of scientists.”
While I applaud loudly Dr. Cicerone’s statement, I wish it had
been made earlier and had not been isolated from the public by
publishing the statement behind paywall at Science. Unfortunately, the void of
substantive statements from our institutions has been filled in ways
that have made the situation much worse.
Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust. While
scientists persist in thinking that they should be trusted because of
their expertise, climategate has made it clear that expertise itself is
not a sufficient basis for public trust. The fallout from
climategate is much broader than the allegations of misconduct by
scientists at two universities. Of greatest importance is
the reduced credibility of the IPCC assessment reports, which are
providing the scientific basis for international policies on climate
change. Recent disclosures about the IPCC have brought up a host
of concerns about the IPCC that had been festering in the background:
involvement of IPCC scientists in explicit climate policy advocacy;
tribalism that excluded skeptics; hubris of scientists with regards to
a noble (Nobel) cause; alarmism; and inadequate attention to the
statistics of uncertainty and the complexity of alternative
interpretations.
The scientists involved in the CRU emails and the IPCC have been
defended as scientists with the best of intentions trying to do their
work in a very difficult environment. They blame the alleged
hacking incident on the “climate denial machine.”
They are described as fighting a valiant war to keep misinformation
from the public that is being pushed by skeptics with links to the oil
industry. They are focused on moving the science forward, rather than
the janitorial work of record keeping, data archival, etc. They have
had to adopt unconventional strategies to fight off what they thought
was malicious interference. They defend their science based upon their
years of experience and their expertise.
Scientists are claiming that the scientific content of the IPCC reports
is not compromised by climategate. The jury is still out on the
specific fallout from climategate in terms of the historical and paleo
temperature records. There are larger concerns (raised by
glaciergate, etc.) particularly with regards to the IPCC Assessment
Report on Impacts (Working Group II): has a combination of
groupthink, political advocacy and a noble cause syndrome stifled
scientific debate, slowed down scientific progress and corrupted the
assessment process? If institutions are doing their jobs, then
misconduct by a few individual scientists should be quickly identified,
and the impacts of the misconduct should be confined and quickly
rectified. Institutions need to look in the mirror and ask the
question as to how they enabled this situation and what opportunities
they missed to forestall such substantial loss of public trust in
climate research and the major assessment reports.
In their misguided war against the skeptics, the CRU emails reveal that
core research values became compromised. Much has been said
about the role of the highly politicized environment in providing an
extremely difficult environment in which to conduct science that
produces a lot of stress for the scientists. There is no question
that this environment is not conducive to science and scientists need
more support from their institutions in dealing with it. However,
there is nothing in this crazy environment that is worth sacrificing
your personal or professional integrity. And when your science
receives this kind of attention, it means that the science is really
important to the public. Therefore scientists need to do
everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate
uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context
that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints.
This is an important responsibility that individual scientists and
particularly the institutions need to take very seriously.
Both individual scientists and the institutions need to look in the
mirror and really understand how this happened. Climategate
isn’t going to go away until these issues are
resolved. Science is ultimately a self-correcting process,
but with a major international treaty and far-reaching domestic
legislation on the table, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The Changing Nature of Skepticism
about Global Warming
Over the last few months, I have been trying to understand how this
insane environment for climate research developed. In my informal
investigations, I have been listening to the perspectives of a broad
range of people that have been labeled as “skeptics” or
even “deniers”. I have come to understand that global
warming skepticism is very different now than it was five years
ago. Here is my take on how global warming skepticism has evolved
over the past several decades.
In the 1980’s, James Hansen and Steven Schneider led the charge
in informing the public of the risks of potential anthropogenic climate
change. Sir John Houghton and Bert Bolin played similar roles in
Europe. This charge was embraced by the environmental advocacy
groups, and global warming alarmism was born. During this period
I would say that many if not most researchers, including myself, were
skeptical that global warming was detectable in the temperature record
and that it would have dire consequences. The traditional foes of
the environmental movement worked to counter the alarmism of the
environmental movement, but this was mostly a war between advocacy
groups and not an issue that had taken hold in the mainstream media and
the public consciousness. In the first few years of the 21st
century, the stakes became higher and we saw the birth of what some
have called a “monolithic climate denial machine”.
Skeptical research published by academics provided fodder for the think
tanks and advocacy groups, which were fed by money provided by the oil
industry. This was all amplified by talk radio and cable news.
In 2006 and 2007, things changed as a result of Al Gore’s movie
“An Inconvenient Truth” plus the IPCC 4th Assessment
Report, and global warming became a seemingly unstoppable
juggernaut. The reason that the IPCC 4th Assessment Report was so
influential is that people trusted the process the IPCC
described: participation of a thousand scientists from 100
different countries, who worked for several years to produce 3000 pages
with thousands of peer reviewed scientific references, with extensive
peer review. Further, the process was undertaken with the
participation of policy makers under the watchful eyes of advocacy
groups with a broad range of conflicting interests. As a
result of the IPCC influence, scientific skepticism by academic
researchers became vastly diminished and it became easier to embellish
the IPCC findings rather than to buck the juggernaut. Big oil
funding for contrary views mostly dried up and the mainstream media
supported the IPCC consensus. But there was a new movement in the
blogosphere, which I refer to as the “climate auditors”,
started by Steve McIntyre. The climate change establishment
failed to understand this changing dynamic, and continued to blame
skepticism on the denial machine funded by big oil.
Climate Auditors and the Blogosphere
Steve McIntyre started the blog climateaudit.org
so that he could defend himself against claims being made at the blog realclimate.org with regards to
his critique of the “hockey stick” since he was unable to
post his comments there. Climateaudit has focused on auditing
topics related to the paleoclimate reconstructions over the past
millennia (in particular the so called “hockey stick”) and
also the software being used by climate researchers to fix data
problems due to poor quality surface weather stations in the historical
climate data record. McIntyre’s “auditing” became
very popular not only with the skeptics, but also with the progressive
“open source” community, and there are now a number of such
blogs. The blog with the largest public audience is wattsupwiththat.com, led by
weatherman Anthony Watts, with over 2 million unique visitors each
month.
So who are the climate auditors? They are technically educated
people, mostly outside of academia. Several individuals have
developed substantial expertise in aspects of climate science, although
they mainly audit rather than produce original scientific research.
They tend to be watchdogs rather than deniers; many of them classify
themselves as “lukewarmers”. They are independent of oil
industry influence. They have found a collective voice in the
blogosphere and their posts are often picked up by the mainstream
media. They are demanding greater accountability and transparency of
climate research and assessment reports.
So what motivated their FOIA requests of the CRU at the University of
East Anglia? Last weekend, I was part of a discussion on this
issue at the Blackboard.
Among the participants in this discussion was Steven Mosher, who broke
the climategate story and has already written a book on it here.
They are concerned about inadvertent introduction of bias into the CRU
temperature data by having the same people who create the dataset use
the dataset in research and in verifying climate models; this concern
applies to both NASA GISS and the connection between CRU and the Hadley
Centre. This concern is exacerbated by the choice of James Hansen at
NASA GISS to become a policy advocate, and his forecasts of forthcoming
“warmest years.” Medical research has long been
concerned with the introduction of such bias, which is why they conduct
double blind studies when testing the efficacy of a medical treatment.
Any such bias could be checked by independent analyses of the data;
however, people outside the inner circle were unable to obtain access
to the information required to link the raw data to the final analyzed
product. Further, creation of the surface data sets was treated
like a research project, with no emphasis on data quality analysis, and
there was no independent oversight. Given the importance of these
data sets both to scientific research and public policy, they feel that
greater public accountability is required.
So why do the mainstream climate researchers have such a problem with
the climate auditors? The scientists involved in the CRU emails seem to
regard Steve McIntyre as their arch-nemesis (Roger Pielke Jr’s
term). Steve McIntyre’s early critiques of the hockey stick were
dismissed and he was characterized as a shill for the oil
industry. Academic/blogospheric guerilla warfare ensued, as
the academic researchers tried to prevent access of the climate
auditors to publishing in scientific journals and presenting their work
at professional conferences, and tried to deny them access to published
research data and computer programs. The bloggers countered with highly
critical posts in the blogosphere and FOIA requests. And
climategate was the result.
So how did this group of bloggers succeed in bringing the climate
establishment to its knees (whether or not the climate establishment
realizes yet that this has happened)? Again, trust plays a big
role; it was pretty easy to follow the money trail associated with the
“denial machine”. On the other hand, the climate
auditors have no apparent political agenda,
are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role,
which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population.
Towards Rebuilding Trust
Rebuilding trust with the public on the subject of climate research
starts with Ralph Cicerone’s statement “Two aspects need
urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal
behaviors of scientists.” Much has been written about
the need for greater transparency, reforms to peer review, etc. and I
am hopeful that the relevant institutions will respond
appropriately. Investigations of misconduct are being conducted
at the University of East Anglia and at Penn State. Here I would
like to bring up some broader issues that will require substantial
reflection by the institutions and also by individual scientists.
Climate research and its institutions have not yet adapted to its high
policy relevance. How scientists can most effectively and
appropriately engage with the policy process is a topic that has not
been adequately discussed (e.g. the “honest broker”
challenge discussed by Roger Pielke Jr), and climate researchers are
poorly informed in this regard. The result has been reflexive
support for the UNFCCC policy agenda (e.g. carbon cap and trade) by
many climate researchers that are involved in the public debate
(particularly those involved in the IPCC), which they believe follows
logically from the findings of the (allegedly policy neutral) IPCC. The
often misinformed policy advocacy by this group of climate scientists
has played a role in the political polarization of this issue.. The
interface between science and policy is a muddy issue, but it is very
important that scientists have guidance in navigating the potential
pitfalls. Improving this situation could help defuse the hostile
environment that scientists involved in the public debate have to deal
with, and would also help restore the public trust of climate
scientists.
The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as
presented by the IPCC is often blamed on difficulties of communicating
such a complex topic to a relatively uneducated public that is referred
to as “unscientific America” by Chris Mooney. Efforts
are made to “dumb down” the message and to frame the
message to respond to issues that are salient to the
audience. People have heard the alarm, but they remain
unconvinced because of a perceived political agenda and lack of trust
of the message and the messengers. At the same time, there is a large
group of educated and evidence driven people (e.g. the libertarians,
people that read the technical skeptic blogs, not to mention policy
makers) who want to understand the risk and uncertainties associated
with climate change, without being told what kinds of policies they
should be supporting. More effective communication strategies can be
devised by recognizing that there are two groups with different levels
of base knowledge about the topic. But building trust through
public communication on this topic requires that uncertainty be
acknowledged. My own experience in making public presentations
about climate change has found that discussing the uncertainties
increases the public trust in what scientists are trying to convey and
doesn’t detract from the receptivity to understanding climate
change risks (they distrust alarmism). Trust can also be rebuilt
by discussing broad choices rather than focusing on specific
policies.
And finally, the blogosphere can be a very powerful tool for increasing
the credibility of climate research. “Dueling
blogs” (e.g. climateprogress.org
versus wattsupwiththat.com
and realclimate.org versus climateaudit.org) can actually
enhance public trust in the science as they see both sides of the
arguments being discussed. Debating science with skeptics should
be the spice of academic life, but many climate researchers lost this
somehow by mistakenly thinking that skeptical arguments would diminish
the public trust in the message coming from the climate research
establishment. Such debate is alive and well in the
blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the
blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the
pioneers in this, and other academic climate researchers hosting blogs
include Roy Spencer, Roger Pielke Sr and Jr, Richard Rood, and Andrew
Dessler. The blogs that are most effective are those that allow
comments from both sides of the debate (many blogs are heavily
moderated). While the blogosphere has a “wild west”
aspect to it, I have certainly learned a lot by participating in the
blogospheric debate including how to sharpen my thinking and improve
the rhetoric of my arguments. Additional scientific voices entering the
public debate particularly in the blogosphere would help in the broader
communication efforts and in rebuilding trust. And we need to
acknowledge the emerging auditing and open source movements in the in
the internet-enabled world, and put them to productive use. The
openness and democratization of knowledge enabled by the internet can
be a tremendous tool for building public understanding of climate
science and also trust in climate research.
No one really believes that the “science is settled” or
that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that
say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is
nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.
And finally, I hope that this blogospheric experiment will demonstrate
how the diversity of the different blogs can be used collectively to
generate ideas and debate them, towards bringing some sanity to this
whole situation surrounding the politicization of climate science and
rebuilding trust with the public.