Who's out of step here?

Once again Rex has made global warming and his denial the topic of his Saturday column. What he's inveighing against this time is the fact that the Copenhagen conference has proceeded without taking the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia into account. For Rex, as we've already seen, these emails (actually a highly selected and carefully misinterpreted few among them) are the smoking gun, clear and undeniable evidence that the science of global warming is too entangled with 'advocacy' to be trusted. What they really are, of course, is evidence of the process of science: science is human, not angelic, and scientists work very hard to make the best case they can for their point of view.

As for Rex, well, it's a peculiar thing, but somehow, while demanding that the scientists he disagrees with be paragons of every moderate virtue (even in their private correspondence), Rex forgets to impose the same standard on the gaggle of deniers he looks to for support. Ian Plimer, for instance, is a mining geologist (not a climatologist), who declared in his book (touted by Rex as the 'last nail in the coffin of AGW' before the release of the hacked emails, which now supersede it in that role-- funny how many last nails that coffin seems to require) that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human beings-- false by two orders of magnitude. One could be forgiven for thinking that this should mar Dr. Plimer's credibility. But Rex is far more worried about scientists who are so deaf to decorum as to criticize journals and editors they disagree with in private emails-- God forbid Rex should ever investigate other episodes in the history of science: for example, Lavoisier founded modern chemistry by waging a journal-creating, colleague-recruiting campaign to supplant phlogiston chemistry, rather than playing the milquetoast role Rex envisions as 'proper' to science, and Crick and Watson eagerly seized on other's data as the pursued their dream of a Nobel prize.

But all these rhetorical ploys are merely prologue: the real problem is that Rex continues to distort the record to defend his denial. Rex sums up his misunderstanding of the East Anglia emails in a single paragraph of simple, but false, assertions, declaring that the emails "revealed a pattern of gate-keeping, of (quite non-scientific) hostility to contrary or dissenting opinions, attempts at controlling the much-touted peer-review process, and... a pronounced tendency to point the data towards the hypothesis rather than the hypothesis toward the data." He closes his litany of distortion by repeating the claim that the "primary data concerning the world's temperature over the last century and a half" have been lost.

But the primary data have not been lost-- they were not retained at East Anglia when their computer hardware was replaced, but are available at NOAA; see Realclimate for an immense collection of links to a wide range of climate data. The myth that the data are just lost is widespread in the denialsphere, along with many other falsehoods (that the climate is now cooling, that sea levels are not rising,...). And this points towards a correction to Rex's first complaints: climate scientists are indeed frustrated by these falsehoods, not to mention continual harassment with hundreds of demands for access to information-- fair enough from colleagues who seriously want to look at the data independently, but a nuisance (and a huge waste of time) when each has to be responded to separately by gathering data, explaining why some may not be available, etc. Worse is the challenge of responding to (or just dealing with) reams of hate-mail and even threats from passionate deniers who have no understanding of the science at all. Little wonder then, if scientists get a little irritated at journals or editors who publish work they regard as not just wrong, but so erroneous that it should have been rejected. Science doesn't proceed by publishing anything and everything-- peer review is supposed to be a filter, but sometimes a weak editor (or a slanted publisher) will accept work that isn't up to snuff. Are scientists just supposed to ignore this?

Just a hint, here, Rex, on why Copenhagen proceeded without taking the hacked emails seriously: they do nothing to undermine the evidence for global warming. Your eagerness to seize on any hint of imperfection in the scientists whose work you've dismissed for years while you continue to ignore the falsehoods and PR games of the denial industry reveals you as either dishonest or self-deceived-- and a hack either way, not a serious commentator on an important issue.