20100614_RI
Source: RIGB (Royal Institution of Great Britain)
URL: http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayEvent&id=1010
Date: 14/06/2010
Event: The Climate Files; The battle for the truth about global warming
People:
- Myles Allen: Physicist and head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford
- Damian Carrington: Head of environment at the Guardian
- Adam Corner: Research Associate in the Understanding Risk research group at Cardiff University
- Fred Pearce: Science writer and journalist
[Applause.]
Damian Carrington: Thanks very much. Good evening everyone, Thanks very much to the Royal Institution for hosting what I think will be a fascinating debate this evening. The emails that we're here to discuss are private emails, written by some of the world's most eminent climate scientists, and leaked or stolen - we don't know which - from the University of East Anglia. They were published on the internet in November last year, shortly before the biggest climate conference the world's ever seen, which may be notable, perhaps. Very quickly after that, those blogs which are sceptical about climate change leaped upon them, took out words and phrases like "trick" and "hide the decline", swore that they found the smoking gun which revealed the conspiracy that anthropogenic global warming was.
Now that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, as I'm sure Fred will talk about shortly, but did raise some very serious questions, shone light into places that we didn't often get to see. Some of those questions are about access to data, the bedrock of scientific research, and also about peer review, which is the gold standard quality control for science. So, I am very pleased indeed to have such a great panel, which I'll introduce now.
First of all, we have Fred - Fred Pearce. Fred's been writing about the environment and climate change for the best part of 30 years, much of that in New Scientist, and certainly long before it became the pressing political and economic issue that it is today. I can't think of anyone, or very few people, who have probably spoken to as many of those protagonists involved before the emails came out, and so, with that in mind, the Guardian commissioned Fred to investigate those emails - thousands and thousands of them - and write a four-part series for our paper that turned into a twelve-part series for our website, on which we invited further comments, and so on. And that has now turned into a book, which will be available shortly. I believe that's your 10th book - is that right, Fred?
Fred Pearce: I've lost count.
Damian Carrington [laughs]: Now James Lovelock has said of Fred that he is one of the few people that understand the world as it really is. Whether that means that, like James, he'd be happy to have a nuclear waste depository in his garden, I hope you'll tell us.
Next, we have - we're very lucky to have Myles Allen, from the University of Oxford, one of the country's foremost climate scientists. Myles has worked at the UN environment programme and at M.I.T., as well as being an author and editor on the last two reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His recent work's focussed on discerning the human fingerprint in climate events, notably the 2003 heatwave that struck Europe. He's also been deeply interested in how science research can inform science policy. Myles in particular has pioneered the idea of a carbon budget as being the best way to set a limit on emissions, rather than a level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Now, Myles has frequently contributed to the Guardian, and has also at times been a very trenchant critic of ours, but it might surprise you to learn that just before the last election, as a climate scientist, Myles argued very passionately that the very last thing that you should do, as someone worried about global warming, is vote Green.
Lastly, we have Adam Corner, from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. Adam's research looks at how people evaluate arguments and evidence, and he's taken a very special interest in the communication of climate change. Now, Adam, I think one of your more most recent papers was in the journal Argumentation, and it was called "Message-framing, fallacy and normative advocacy", so I hope you get all three of those this evening.
And without further ado, I'll hand over to Fred. Oh sorry, just one last word about the arrangements. Fred's going to talk for about half an hour, then we'll have a response from Myles and from Adam, then a discussion and I shall open it to the floor for comments and questions. So, thanks Fred. [Applause.]
Fred Pearce: Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you for coming. Going on with the story [?] in a bit, but let me just set the scene - I think it's important to do that. The Climategate story broke, for me and I think certainly for most journalists, one Friday lunchtime in late November 2009, when a huge file of emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit had been copied and were published on the internet. Nobody knew who did it, but the bloggers who first alerted the world to the files were certainly spinning them from the start with their own interpretations.
They said the emails revealed a global conspiracy to dupe the world about man-made climate change. And they had their quotes from the emails ready. Their interpretations were often highly misleading, to anybody who, kind of, knew the field at all. But, as in most breaking news stories, whoever grabs the agenda first, often gets to define the issue.
That afternoon, I called Phil Jones, the Director of the Climatic Research Unit, or CRU. He was the keeper of the thermometer record of 160 years of global warming, CRU's scientific crown jewels, if you will. That record, assembled from thousands of weather stations around the world, provided compelling evidence that the world has been warming, especially in the past half century. Jones told me he thought the Russians were behind the hack into CRU's web server - he didn't quite say which Russians, but that was his - and he had some reason for thinking that was what had happened. But he certainly knew that whoever did the deed, he had plenty of critics out there that were going to cause trouble.
I think I was one of the few journalists to speak to Jones, before his university imposed a news blackout. The university didn't want to discuss the content of the emails. So far as it was concerned, this was theft and the perpetrators had to be found. Nobody, least of all journalists, should be dealing in stolen property. That, so far as it was concerned, was the end of the story. I think it was a drastic miscalculation, and led to quite a lot of - certainly heat in the debate, which could otherwise have been avoided.
The trouble was that the emails were out there and being commented on at great rates. Somebody had put them on a website with a search facility, which made it an awful lot easier for people like me to search their way through the themes that were emerging. And among them I found one of my own emails to a CRU researcher back in 1986. I also found several emails mentioning me and criticising my journalism, but we'll leave that aside. As I read a sample of the - there were a thousand or so emails, as well as other things, in the file - as I read a sample of them, two things, over that weekend - two things became clear.
First, that whatever the bloggers claimed, there was no smoking gun over climate science. There was no grand conspiracy. But second, it seemed to me that there were an awful lot of rather unpleasant bits of email chat between the CRU scientists and their correspondents in the U.S. They were about how to bad-mouth and marginalise their critics, how to prevent those critics getting hold of their data. The first pieces that I did on this, for New Scientist magazine, the following week, picked up on really, basically those two points. No big smoking gun but some issues that were being raised. And it was more than idle chatter. It didn't look good. And that I think is why, the following Tuesday, the Guardian's columnist George Monbiot - by no means a climate sceptic - called on Jones to resign. I don't, for myself, think that was a correct call, but that was his judgement, having read emails, more or less, in the way that I had.
By early December, the quotes taken from the emails were beginning to have a real impact on public confidence, especially, I think, because the CRU scientists were not responding. Opinion polls were beginning to show evidence that people were less certain and more confused about climate science. And with the CRU scientists not responding, not able to respond, being told by the university not to respond, silence began to sound like guilt.
Here's a fairly typical piece of coverage, suggesting in tantalisingly vague terms some kind of global conspiracy. It was easy to put together this kind of, sort of journalism, which doesn't really make any specific point but gives a sense of something bad gone wrong. Now, many environment and science reporters didn't want to touch the story. They didn't like this kind of stuff. They felt it would encourage - even reporting it would encourage climate deniers who didn't deserve the attention. Many, also, to be fair, had a climate conference in Copenhagen to go and report, in a few days, and they were busy researching that. So this story didn't come at a good time for them, in terms of their time.
But it seemed to be that the emails required a thorough analysis, an analysis that, kind of, explained the context in which they were written, and exposed lies being told about the emails, but also discussed the legitimate questions that, it seemed to me, were being raised by the content of the emails. Questions already being discussed about how research is conducted, about whether the self-policing system of peer review was doing its job well, in climate science, and about whether, in an internet age, it makes sense to keep the world of science so closed. So I began to read them.
And starting over Christmas, it began to seem to me that this might be a fairly substantial project to get involved in. I can only give you a brief flavour of what I found - the rest is in the book, but... I'm going to take a few examples. Not the most dramatic examples, necessarily, but a few examples of the kind of things that turned up, and the kind of themes that emerged.
First, I think it's important to talk about the bloggers' lies. The most quoted extract from the emails is from Phil Jones- sorry, I'll go back a second, I'll give you that slide in a minute. The most quoted extract from the emails is from Phil Jones to U.S. colleague Mike Mann in 1999. In it, he discusses using - quote - "Mike's Nature trick" to - quote- "hide the decline". It's come to be, as we all know, become the kind of totem of the whole Climategate saga, widely spun as an effort to prevent the truth getting out that global temperatures had stopped rising. That's the story that you'll hear a lot. Sarah Palin, in the Washington Post, described it, I think, as "snake-oil science". She said it showed that scientists had - quote - "manipulated data to hide the decline in global temperatures". And she was joined by leading Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who'd been attacking climate scientists for years, so this is meat and drink to him. And at the climate conference in Copenhagen in December, he made that same connection. "Of course", he said, when he talked about "hide the decline" - "Of course, Jones meant 'hide the decline in temperatures'."
This is nonsense. Simply cannot be true. And while Palin might simply have been confused - I'll concede that - I refuse to believe that Inhofe, who'd been on the trail for a long time, didn't know that he was telling a bit of a porkie here. Because I'll ask this: what decline in temperatures could Jones have been referring to, in 1999? No, global temperatures have been fairly steady in the past decade. Since then, Inhofe knew that... But this email, as I said, was written in 1999, and at that time there was no suggestion of a decline in temperatures, no suggestion of a stabilising of temperatures. They'd been rising all through the 1990s. The previous year, 1998, had been the warmest year in the warmest decade on record. He cannot possibly have been referring to things that hadn't happened yet. And yet, he was making this comment, that Jones was talking about "hiding the decline" in global temperatures.
So, what did Jones mean? Well, I think we should address that. Here's the full - the full quote, taken from the emails. The decline he was referring to was quite clearly not a real temperature decline, a thermometer decline. It was an apparent decline in temperatures over the past 50 years in an analysis of tree rings, Keith Briffa's area of expertise. Now there's a history to this. Tree rings had previously correlated very well with changes in temperature, and been used as a proxy for temperature. But that relationship was broken down in the past half century - the reasons are still debated. And they matter, of course. But "Mike's Nature trick" was a graphic technique used by Mann in a 1998 paper in Nature, to merge tree-ring data from earlier times with temperature data from recent decades. So the two were stuck together on a single graph. Now, that was a controversial thing to do, in science circles. But it wasn't a secret. Mann explained what he'd been doing, in the paper itself. And Jones was repeating this trick in another paper. Big deal. But Inhofe didn't care about that. And I think his interpretation was a clear lie.
So, it's important to make clear that many of the claims being made about the emails were plain wrong, and sometimes, it seems, deliberately wrong. By people with political motives. But I'm afraid not everything in the emails can be explained in such terms. There is more worrying stuff, or stuff that I regard as worrying. For instance, evidence some senior climate scientists were seeming to use their position, as peer reviewers for journals, to block publication of criticisms of their own work. It would seem like a conflict of interest, but seemed to happen quite a lot.
So let's look at what the emails reveal about one case, Phil Jones' role in peer review, which I think illustrates that. Again, a little bit of background - a key element in the story of 20th century warming is that - is what's been happening in Siberia. This is a huge area, and it appears to have seen exceptional warming, more than any other land area on the planet, so clearly this has a significance for the global picture. But it's such a remote region actual data is thin on the ground, so how reliable is that data, and did Jones interpret it correctly in creating his global database? Now Jones has had critics for years on this point, who said he manipulated the data in a way that was misleading. The problem, it was said, was that there are not many weather stations in Siberia. Well, that's true. And that most of them tend to be near the small number of urban areas in Siberia. And that's true.
So the suggestion of Jones' critics is that these cities caused local heating, just that the physical heating within the cities caused local heating that was being misinterpreted as warming across the whole area of Siberia, and that this was perhaps corrupting the global data. Now, Jones regarded such critics as troublemakers. He was clear, in his own mind, that this urban heat island effect, as it's called, was small, and he regarded such critics as troublemakers. I think it's fairly clear that he tried to shut them down. And he is one example of that.
In March 2004 Jones wrote to Mike Mann, saying that as a peer reviewer, he had - quote - "recently rejected two papers" - one was from the Journal of Geophysical Research, one for Geophysical Research Letters - "from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia". And he went on: "I went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".
Jones doesn't say which papers he'd reviewed, but one appears to have been by a Swedish astrophysicist called Lars Kamél. Kamél claimed to find much less warming in Siberia than Jones - that old theme - despite analysing much the same data. And he said Jones' analysis was probably skewed by this local urban heating effect - again, a past refrain. But I think it was a rare example of someone trying to carry out one of the central tasks of any scientist, to replicate the findings of others. This is a basic thing that scientists always have to do, try to replicate the findings of others.
So, on the face of it, there was good reason to publish this rare example of attempting to replicate Jones's work. And if it contained flaws, then, arguably, certainly it was worth addressing those flaws and trying to get them corrected, so that the paper could be published, rather than - as appears to have happened - the paper was rejected. Well, indeed it was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters that year, partly, it seems, on Jones' recommendation, the recommendation in which, as he says, he "went to town".
So that raises questions, I think. Should he have had that power? Given that he had a clear conflict of interest - this paper was directly criticising his own work. This paper was - should he have used it? Used that power, in the way that he did? Perhaps an unbiased peer reviewer would have encouraged publication, if necessary after revision. Now that's - I'm not saying here that Kamél was right and Jones was wrong, or vice-versa, on the substance of the matter - that's not really the issue. Just to say that in a field of research where there's a common dataset, rare examples like this of independent analysis ought to be encouraged, rather than cut off at the knees. And I think the evidence is that Phil Jones here was cutting it off at the knees.
Now, Jones's most frequent correspondent in the emails - there's a guy whose name constantly comes up, called Mike Mann, climate scientist at Penn State University now. And while Jones - they're an interesting contrast of characters. While Jones is quiet and intense, Mann is loud and extrovert. Both, in their different ways, however, are extremely combative. And in my own judgement, reading the emails, they tend to egg each other on. If you read the correspondence going backwards and forth, that's at least what I take from it, anyway. Between them, acting together or sometimes separately, they have a reputation for attacking journals that publish papers they think are of poor quality.
In 2003 the emails show they launched a - crusade, I think it's fair to call it - to boycott Climate Research, a small but influential journal publishing papers critical of Mann's Hockey Stick graph - this is the famous graph, based on both thermometer and proxy data, suggesting that recent decades have been warmer, not just in the recent past but warmer than anything in the past millennium. Here is one version of the graph, there are a number of them around. And you can perhaps see the kind of hockey stick shape on it. Kind of totemic image of the whole climate change, or climate science, really. And the debate over the Hockey Stick has been going on for a decade or more, and it's seen more heat than light, I think, in many ways - in no small part, I suspect, because researchers like Mann have, kind of, tried to close down the debate, saying that it's all done, it's all dusted, we know the truth. And that strategy has tended to have the opposite effect.
And, again, here is an example. In 2004 Jones wrote an email to Mann about two new papers in Climate Research, criticising the Hockey Stick. One was from two known sceptics, Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels, and that claimed to show a correlation between the geographical patterns of warming, on the one hand, and industrialisation and economic development, on the other hand. Two similar - patterns on the surface of the Earth were similar, they were suggesting. McKitrick said the correlations are large and statistically significant. And they were suggesting, like Kamél before, that local urbanisation [?] - local heating effect from urban areas, rather than global influences of greenhouse gases, were often a key element in warming on land.
Jones called the paper "garbage". That was fair enough, it was a private email. But then he added "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin" - that's Kevin Trenberth, an American climate scientist - "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is." And that's not fair enough, I don't think. The bit about redefining peer review literature is no more than [?] a joke, but Jones evident wanted the paper kept out - or the two papers - kept out of the IPCC record. And as a joint author, with Trenberth, for the relevant chapter in the next IPCC report, he had considerable power to do just that. Again, there seems a clear conflict of interest here, and it's not clear that he was using - that he was standing back, in making the judgements that he did.
Jones said, after the emails had become public, he admitted that this was - that threatening to keep the papers out was something he shouldn't have done. He said - quote - "the comment was naive and sent before I understood the process" - the IPCC process. I have a bit of trouble with that. He'd been a contributing author to IPCC reports for more than a decade, and I kind of find it difficult to believe that he didn't know what the rules were, and that that was something he shouldn't have been even thinking about.
Anyway, what happened? As threatened by Jones in that email, the paper - the M&M paper - was not mentioned in the first two drafts of the IPCC report chapter. But then it showed up in the final version. But its findings were dismissed, in that final version, as not statistically significant. Now, this is troubling, in the sense of the process. Its late arrival meant that reviewers had no chance to criticise or correct this interpretation, that it was not statistically significant, that Jones and Trenberth had put on the paper, in that final version of the report, because the review process hadn't been gone through, through all the stages. And that's especially troubling, since the comment was not sourced in the report, and according to McKitrick - and I don't know, independently, whether this is true - but according to McKitrick, it's still unverified in the published literature.
Again, I don't know who's right, here, on the substance of the matter, about what correlates with what, whether there was significant correlation or not. The trouble is that in this kind of fog of war, nobody else does, either. The politics of peer review, it seems to me, has got in the way of the probity of an IPCC assessment process, assessment of the science, which on this point looks dodgy, shall we say. And I'm afraid this email suggests that there was a kind of axe to grind, and that that, as I say, got in the way of a proper, balanced assessment.
Let's turn to the second aspect, beyond this peer review aspect, the second area of concern - Freedom of Information. Jones was one of the first climate scientists for impressively [?] to realise that Freedom of Information legislation was going to seriously impinge on his work. He realised that his critics would be using it to chase his data. I think it was this that ultimately led to Climategate, as I'll come to. And it happened, in large part, because Jones misunderstood his critics' trying to grab his data. Here's a man who caused most of the trouble - Steve McIntyre, Canadian mathematician, retired - or partially retired, anyway - from the mining industry, where he spent most of his career, and now more of a dedicated, full-time campaigner to gain access to data from climate scientists, notably Mike Mann and, more recently, Phil Jones. And he says he wants to get the data to test their conclusions, so sometimes I think he just simply wants to get the data because he thinks it ought to be available.
Now, the emails show that mainstream scientists like Jones assumed McIntyre to be an arch-climate sceptic. Politically driven and perhaps commercially funded to trash their work, and they treated him accordingly. Now, those motives are a strong trait in the criticism of mainstream climate scientists by some critics, as we know, but McIntyre is part of a new generation, I think, of "so-called sceptics", if you like. But he's really a data libertarian. He's arguably an obsessive - some people would certainly call him that - but not actually much of a climate sceptic at all. Interestingly, when he gave a talk a few weeks ago, at a meeting of sceptics in the U.S. - some of you will have seen Roger Harrabin from the BBC report - he was cheered onto the platform as a hero, but then booed off it after saying that he believed the evidence supported man-made climate change. So, whatever he is, he's not a conventional climate sceptic, still less a climate denier.
But, I think, by misreading him - and some of the people clustered around him - Jones, Mann and others got themselves into a lot of trouble. And that, to me, is part of the tragedy of Climategate - and I do view it as a tragedy, rather than anything else. It's a tragedy of misunderstood motives. And those misunderstood motives, kind of, precipitated a data war, with mainstream climate scientists wanting to hang on to their data and not to hand it over to their critics, and their critics redoubling their efforts to try and get the data by fair means or foul.
Now, as early as 2005, Jones told Mann that McIntyre and his co-author Ross McKitrick, as a more conventional sceptic, had been after the CRU station data for years. "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think that I'll delete the files rather than send to anyone". That, incidentally, if I read it right, would have been against the law. No evidence they actually did delete those files, but that was probably rather a naughty thought to have.
In fact, Jones seemed to adopt, rather, another approach to critics like McIntyre. By 2007, he was writing - quote - "Think I've managed to persuade UEA" - that's the University of East Anglia - "Think I've managed to persuade the UEA to ignore all further FOI requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit". Climate Audit is the website run by McIntyre. And he later explained: "When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person at the university said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions, wanted to scream to convince them otherwise, showing them what Climate Audit was all about." He went on: "Once they became aware of the type of people we are dealing with, everyone at UEA became very supportive."
So, Jones somehow says he followed the rules, about Freedom of Information. I think there is some evidence he was, kind of, writing the rules himself. He seems to have, kind of, been part of, encouraged a culture of turning down FOI requests at CRU. The records - we obtained numbers, through our own Freedom of Information request at the Guardian - records show that of 105 requests concerning the Climatic Research Unit, submitted up to December 2009, the university had, by the late January 2010, acceded in full to only ten. So, ten out of 105 requests, at that point. And this refusal to, kind of, "go with the flow" of information, if I can put it that way, is creating real anger among those demanding the data. And they concluded, among other things, that CRU had things to hide. So it only encouraged them to increase their applications. If the idea was to reduce the workload at CRU, then it was, arguably, having the opposite effect.
Where all this really got Jones and his colleagues into hot water, was over their work on the IPCC Assessment, published in 2007. A year later, British sceptic David Holland asked a clever question - he asked CRU, under Freedom of Information law, for all emails sent and received by its tree ring specialist Keith Briffa concerning the IPCC report, for which Briffa was a chapter lead author. And the IPCC has its own rules about open review. It archives its formal review process, and all exchanges go online. But Holland wanted to see if there were any secret email discussions outside that formal process, and it turns out, from the hacked emails, when they finally emerged, that there were. Briffa had long undisclosed correspondence about an important paper by two American researchers called Gene Wahl and Caspar Amman. The paper defended Mann's Hockey Stick from new and damaging attack from sceptics, and this was critical to Briffa's chapter. An email showed that Briffa and others wanted to reference this paper's findings in their report, even though it was incomplete at that point - it was only going to be published after their own deadline for their own report. And Mann was included in these email discussions.
So it all got a bit, kind of, messy, and appears to be, kind of, outside the rules of IPCC. This correspondence was embarrassing, and seemingly a breach, as I say, of IPCC rules. Clearly, CRU people wanted to prevent the release of this correspondence, to Holland. In one of the most damaging emails here, Jones asked Mann: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith" - that was Keith Briffa - "re AR4" - which is the IPCC report. "Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? We'll be getting Caspar to do the same". This, I think, is damaging stuff, whether or not the emails were actually deleted. The emails seem to have been what persuaded the British government's Information Commissioner's office to review, that in his view, some FOI requests at the university were not dealt with as they should have been, under the legislation. Hot water, I think.
So... Yep, I'm coming to an end. More or less. I'll close it now... So, 2009 saw a rising tide of FOI requests at CRU. Jones and his team saw them as a threat to their work. There weren't many people there - it took up their time. In June 2009, McIntyre started demanding - basically that is when he started demanding the CRU crown jewels, Jones's key data. Jones said "No, you can't have it". The information was not his to give, he said, and there was a long exchange about confidentiality agreements, and what they were. I'll leave that out, but at any rate, McIntyre appealed against the university refusing his access to the data. And his appeal was turned down, and this is significant because of the timing here in the context of the Climategate. Because in the days between the letter being written, to turn down that appeal, and that letter being received, something else happened. Climategate happened. And I can't believe that this is entirely a coincidence. The files released on the internet contained emails sent and received up till the 12th of November, the day before the rejection letter was written. But the emails were in the hands of U.S. bloggers before the letter was sent to McIntyre, and this suggests - it's only circumstantial evidence, but I think it suggests - that perhaps somebody within the university, perhaps somebody angry about how the university was handling these Freedom of Information requests, was behind the release of these emails. As I say, it's purely circumstantial evidence, but perhaps, six months later, with no - the police seemingly nowhere near a conclusion to their investigation, it seems to me to look the most likely answer.
Now, just to sum up, most of this has been about the scientific process. I do want to end slightly by coming back to the science itself. Seems to be nothing here damages the fundamentals of climate science. In the end, nothing uncovered in the emails upsets the 200-year old science behind the greenhouse effect of gases such as carbon dioxide. Nothing changes the fact that carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere. Nothing changes, in essence, this graph of global warming. There are some questions, perhaps, about warming on land, and whether that data on that is quite as straightforward as they look. But we know, from oceans warming far away from urban areas, we know the world is warming from Arctic ice retreating, we know from glaciers melting, we know an awful lot of stuff. We know that graph is right, and we know, perhaps - if you want a more cartoon version of it - that the world is warming.
I was going to go on to talk - perhaps I won't do this - I was going to talk about the people who are trying to make peace between the climate scientists and the sceptics, who are suggesting that it is now important to try and open up scientists - science, to more players, people like McIntyre, that in an internet world, it is necessary to open up the process, to provide more data more easily, and perhaps for a review of the peer-review system and particularly where conflicts of interest, of the kind that I've described, arise. I think people like Phil Jones have in some sense been a victim of bad rule-making in science, and outdated rule-making in science. And I think that needs looking at, I think perhaps the Royal Society might take an investigation into it, it's the kind of thing that might usefully be done. I think the people at the top of climate science, or the top of science in general, have perhaps not realised, for instance, the importance of Freedom of Information legislation and how that might impinge on their work.
I'm going to stop there, but that's - all that said, we still have to cope with the threat of global warming. Thanks.
[Audience applause.]
Damian Carrington: Thank you very much, Fred. I'm going to ask Myles Allen to speak next, for a few moments, to respond to that.
Myles Allen: All right. I just have one slide, actually - can we put it up? Which is my recommendation for the cover of Fred's book. Okay. So this shows you the impact of Climategate on the record of human influence on climate. The red is after, the black is before. To help you out, the 1878 - I think - had to be revised upwards by a few hundredths of a degree. This is the problem here - is that, if you remember the previous slide you saw - actually, let's go back to the previous slide from Fred... That's too much hassle... The problem is, we've had pictures of London underwater, from Fred, for so long that it became almost necessary to blow up this whole Climategate saga to this level, in order to restore brand Pierce, brand Guardian, brand environmental writing to its credibility.
This is what I find so deeply depressing about the whole affair - is that the whole incident is being exploited by lots of people, not just the climate sceptics, to reposition themselves, following the perceived failure of Copenhagen. Richard Black of the BBC was disarmingly frank - when we were talking about this in Oxford, he made these remarks in public, and he said "Well, yes, Copenhagen was a bit of a washout, and we needed something else to talk about". And so hence the vast amounts of coverage which was devoted to the Climategate affair. People were looking for a scapegoat for Copenhagen's failure, and they've certainly found one in Phil - Phil Jones.
I was, first - my attention was first drawn to Climategate by a journalist phoning me to say - to ask me about this, and to ask me specifically about the allegation that software used - the emails had revealed that software used in preparation of global temperatures was faulty, was sub-standard. This, of course, had big implications for me. I'd spent all of my career working with that data record. And if it was based on faulty software, then I was going to have to re-do an awful lot of papers and a lot of things were going to have to change. So I took the allegation seriously. I went and looked at the Newsnight piece in question - I hadn't seen it on the television so I looked at it on the computer - big mistake, now, journalists, letting you see their coverage again on computers - and I realised that they were actually analysing the wrong software. The software they were analysing was nothing to do with the global temperature record at all.
So I called Newsnight on this, and their response was "Well, it's all climate change software". Which makes no sense at all to a climate change scientist. I mean, to be fair to Fred, he doesn't fall into - you don't talk about the software allegation. Although I would argue it's a shame you don't, because that was by far the most damaging allegation made. As far as I'm concerned, allegations about, you know, innuendo and er... the sort of - as you call it, the sort of - the coffee table chat between scientists about papers - don't matter, whereas the numbers do matter. And what matters is that the numbers have not been affected in the slightable [Did he mean to say "slightest" here?] You know, a small correction has been identified, thanks to the bloggers - and, of course, as scientists we're grateful for any small corrections that are identified by anybody. But you've got to get the whole thing in context.
And this is the issue, here, and this is the reason I - I'm afraid a lot of us, when we heard Fred was going to do this investigation, I thought: okay, that's fine, let's see what comes out of this. I'm afraid I've really been disappointed by the outcome, because it's of course very hard to write a book, saying the subject of this book is boring. And dangerous as well, and not very profitable. Certainly for the publishers of the book. But at the end of the day, these emails have revealed almost exactly nothing about climate science that we didn't know before. The controversies, they've given lots of people an excuse to disinter lots of ancient controversies which have been running since the mid-'90s.
The two big issues that Fred raises - data access and peer review... First of all, on peer review, my response to that is: I don't know whether you've looked at any other climate scientists' email inbox, for the past 15 years, but as a statistician I'm always reluctant to make inferences on the basis of a sample of one. And that's what we have. You've got one scientist's email inbox. You have no idea what standard practice is, in science. And my understanding, from informal conversations with other scientists, is that the sort of discussions which go on between the climate scientists here, pale into insignificance behind the backbiting and bitching which goes on in astrophysics or other - [audience laughter] I just mention that as one area.
It's - so the idea that this raises deep, serious questions about the operation of peer review in science is, to any scientists, frankly incom- absurd. And that's - so that's the context issue and the worry over that. The other one is about data access. Again, this is an important issue. When I've started getting asked questions about the emails, I recognised this as an important problem. I phoned John Christy and Eduardo Zorita, both of whom are mentioned very critically in the emails - they're definitely on the "other side" to Phil Jones, and they're certainly not members of Phil Jones's camp, as it were, within climate science circles - to ask them if either of them had ever had any problem whatsoever getting data out of CRU, and the answer from both of them was: of course not. And I think it's a great shame that your book doesn't emphasise that point.
Phil Jones has always been completely open about his data, his methods and the background to the datasets he produces with other climate scientists. The difficulty which we face - now, as climate scientists - is thanks to Freedom of Information legislation, we are no longer allowed to distinguish between other scientists and activists or members of the public. And that, of course, is going to change the way science works. And I think you'e quite right there - if enforced in this way, it will change the way science works. I think we have to ask quite serious questions about whether that change is desirable.
The old peer-review system of scientists operating, criticising each other's works within the scientific community, where basically you had to at least get a Masters in the relevant discipline in order to enter this community - so we had a kind of a gatekeeper system, which meant that the number of people asking these questions was limited - has worked pretty well, for several hundred years. And do we really want to throw this out and replace it by open - you know, open out-try [sounded a little like "outcry" but the second bit was definitely "try") in the blogosphere, or whatever your preferred method is. And I know that you're going to go on to take up these issues on peer review, so I won't talk further about that.
So I think what the tragedy here is what's really lost through the whole Climategate saga is a sense of perspective. A sense of what these emails actually reveal about climate science. I mean, you correctly said, at the end, you know, it didn't really make any difference to the evidence for global warming, but relentlessly throughout the whole Climategate saga, journalists have kept reminding us - and you've kept reminding us as well, Fred - that, you know, Phil was the curator of the instrumental record of global temperature, that was the crown jewel, and so on. And none of the supposedly scandalous emails really pertained to that at all. And to that central record. And so it's - the sort of, the real libel on climate science, if you like, is to keep reminding people that Phil was looking after that instrumental record, when in fact he wasn't - it was being looked after by the Met Office, by the time any of this blew up.
And it's a bit like a Diana story - if you can find any link to Diana, it gives you an excuse to put Diana on the front page. And if you can find any remote link to the instrumental temperature record, of course, it, sort of, makes the story sound important. And that's what I think is - that's where we lose a sense of perspective, here. So, I think that's where I didn't like your book. It's interesting stuff, but I think the - I'm sorry but I felt that the sense of proportion is quite well illustrated by this figure. Showing that figure betrays a lack of sense of proportion about the climate issue. You know, I don't think that's going to happen, Fred. Okay? I'm a climate scientist. All right.
Damian Carrington: Thank you very much, Myles Allen. [Audience applause.] Right - Adam Corner.
Adam Corner: I think we all owe Fred a debt of gratitude, actually, for doing the honourable thing and wading through all those emails, because I'm sure they weren't all as exciting as the ones that were on the screen. But I want to pick up on a point of Myles's, which is really about a sense of perspective, and how much does this matter - from two angles, really. Firstly, how much does it matter in terms of what impact has it had on public attitudes towards climate change? And secondly, how much does it matter in terms of the way science is practised?
And I'd like to start, really, by just - by saying that I don't think it's really correct to say that the British public, or even the American public, can be described in any meaningful way as sceptical about climate change. And I also don't think it's very accurate to say that Climategate has in any way been the final straw that's pushed the public over the edge into not believing in climate change. It's difficult to sum up what the public attitudes towards climate change are, but - we see, in poll after poll, year after year, some consistent trends. And a majority of people accept that the climate is changing, a majority of people are concerned about that. And a majority of people think that something needs to be done about it.
So, the most recent figures we have for the UK are a poll conducted by colleagues of mine at Cardiff University, and that showed that 78% of people think the climate is changing, 71% are concerned about it, 65% are prepared to reduce their energy use to tackle climate change and 68% would vote in favour of public spending on climate change.
Now, set against these broad trends, it's true that there is also a tendency towards people questioning, or becoming more uncertain about whether humans are responsible for climate change. And this is what tends to be called "scepticism". But I'd like to argue that it's not surprising that the public are somewhat confused, because people have been very much trying to confuse them. But also that describing the public as sceptical, when actually they support mitigation of climate change, is not particularly meaningful.
So, I think this matters for understanding what the impact of Climategate has been, because the public are not - as are often presented - teetering on the edge of not believing in climate change. And we're now starting to see some findings trickle in, specifically on Climategate. There was a new survey in the U.S. last week. This was a nationally representative study - so this was thousands of people - that found that only about 9% of respondents had actually heard of it or, months later, could recall it. And we found something similar as well, with the student sample in Cardiff and in Sussex. We're only finding that about 20% of the people we're asking had even heard of it, so that obviously has an implication for how much it can have had an impact on attitudes, if they don't remember it.
So my first challenge to Fred, really, is to say: are we really overestimating the importance of Climategate, beyond the advocates, the ideological sceptics and the media? My second point does pick up on something that Myles mentioned, but something that Fred didn't, in what he said today, although a quote I found from one of the pieces that Fred wrote for the Guardian was that "lab doors should be forced open whether scientists like it or not, if only to prove there is no conspiracy in climate research." "Part of the problem is secrecy in science."
Now, clearly anyone with an interest in engaging the public on climate change, or science in general, is going to relish the opportunity to prove that there's no conspiracy going on anywhere. But, as part of the work that we've been doing in Cardiff on Climategate, I interviewed a couple of sociologists of science, Harry Collins and Rob Evans. And they've both spent a long time observing how scientists work, and the practices of science, so they know as much as anyone about how science is carried out and what the norms are.
And this is what Harry had to say about the idea of making scientific evidence available for anyone with a computer to pore over. "Analysing data and making sense of it is a very subtle business. Analysing data and getting something out of it is very easy. You can get out of it more or less what you want. There are an infinite number of ways to analyse data, and it would take an infinite amount of time to track down all the things that had gone wrong. If you allow that to happen, then you are saying goodbye to your science."
It's quite a bold statement, but I think I would agree with it, because science is not just a community of interests, it's a community of expertise. And that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be transparent, or honest or accountable. But there's not really any suggestion in these emails, I don't think, that those things haven't been observed. And it says that someone that isn't a climate scientist can't just go charging around in climate science databases, hoping to make sense of them. What would I do, as a non-climate scientist, with a database full of tree-ring data? I'd make a naive attempt at interpreting it. Perhaps, if I wanted to, I'd wilfully misinterpret it. And it would take me not very long to produce something pseudo-scientific but plausible. It would take Myles a long time to undo all the damage that I had done.
So, my second challenge is whether, in a rush to prove that climate science is being conducted honestly and openly, we could be in danger of sacrificing something more important, which is the ability of science to function at all.
Damian Carrington: Thank you very much, Adam. Right, a few arrows pinged in your direction, Fred. [Audience applause.] So I'd like to give you an opportunity to respond to that. I mean, things probably to point out are that, like Richard Black, who didn't have anything to write about after Copenhagen, one that your argument that allowing data access to members of the public is wrong, and that you've over-emphasised the whole importance of this, in a Princess Diana-like way.
Fred Pearce: Yeah, I don't think I've overestimated, in any sense, the importance of Climategate for public opinion. I don't think it will have a long-lasting - it has had a short-term effect in making people a bit more confused because, you know, a lot of stuff has been said. I don't think that's particularly part of what I've done, but I think the immediate response of it, and all the blogging and all the way that the newspapers, or much of the media, handled the initial emails, which was very messy, and taking what quite a lot of what the sceptics said at face value - or appearing to - was certainly very confusing. I think, in the longer term, I don't think it will have great impact on how the public will see that.
Sacrificing the ability of science to function at all? I don't... I mean, any institution, when you open it up, to whether it's, sort of, league tables for schools or marks out of ten for hospital cleanliness, can have perverse consequences. You have to guard against those, and make a judgement about whether you're, overall, doing good. But I think probably science is going to have to open up more, in terms of sharing data with people outside, if you like, the kind of priesthood of science, people like McIntyre. And it's probably going to have to be more rather scrupulous about things like conflict of interest in peer review. I think that's going to be demanded of - by users of science, us and governments and other people. I think that's a more sort of general trend in society, that science has been rather insulated from - for a long time. So I think that's, you know - I think those are long-term processes, and probably the Climategate issue is just a stepping-stone along that.
Coming to Myles' stuff, I don't recognise "brand Pearce". I mean, I've been hacking away -
Myles Allen: Well, you still showed that figure.
Fred Pearce: Yeah. I mean, I've been hacking away at this stuff for an awfully long time, and if I'd wanted to establish a brand Pearce of climate change, I might have done it long ago. For me, this just seemed like something which ought to be done. Partly because there was material that I thought it would be worthwhile for somebody to explore. Now, nobody wants to read the book, that's fine. Job over, you know, Fred Pearce spent three months doing something of no usefulness to anybody. If you want to read it, then perhaps it will have been useful. Secondly, because a lot of rubbish has been talked about the emails. And it seemed to me, actually, useful to go in and go through them - I mean, it was, as you say, it was a fairly thankless task, but to actually go through them and try and make sense of them. Now, in the process, you can be accused of, sort of, exaggerating their importance or making mountains out of molehills, and so on. I tried not to do that. I tried to take the evidence as I saw it. It's going to have to be for others to judge whether I was successful about that. But I don't think that's - it's not a kind of tabloid-style book saying scandal here, scandal there. You know, I've tried to be measured and nuanced about it. As I said, it'll be for others to judge whether I've succeeded. Um... Have I covered your points?
Damian Carrington: Well Fred, let me ask Myles to come back there. I mean, Fred's defence is that he's tried to shed more light than otherwise would have been available, given that this was being reported. I mean, something we haven't mentioned, of course, is that there are investigations ongoing, the police investigation and also the Muir Russell report, which was set up to be independent, by the University of East Anglia. And it hasn't reported yet, which I know is a point that you've made before, Myles. But I mean Fred's defence is that he's tried to clarify misconceptions, you know, spike lies that have happened. I mean, do you feel he failed in that?
Myles Allen: Well, I think the whole, sort of, mainstream science-reporting community - so you're certainly not alone in this - having decided that the bloggers were running away with this, and then decided that therefore there was a story - simply because the bloggers had told them there was a story - that allowed the whole thing to snowball in a way that it certainly shouldn't have done. I don't know what you think, Fred, about the BBC's practice of putting the "trick to hide the decline" phrase - whenever they reported on the story they flashed that up on the screen - when they knew - the producers in the BBC - must have known that the viewers were interpreting that phrase incorrectly. Because, you know, by that time it was clear what the phrase actually meant, and it didn't mean what all their viewers were going to think of it as meaning. And yet they were flashing it up all the time, to send this, sort of, subliminal message whenever they reported on the problem. I'd be interested to know what Fred thinks about that sort of coverage.
But the key point here is that, you know, that it did make a difference. The mainstream media, people like the Guardian and Fred taking up the story from the bloggers, and if it had been left as a blogosphere whirlwind it would have done very substantially less damage. And I think what the tragedy here is that an awful lot, it seems to me, an awful lot of science reporters effectively abdicated their responsibility to use their own judgement, as to whether or not there was a story there, and just said "Well, yes there must be a story there because everybody says there is one." Rather than - and I should say that reporters on the Guardian, including David Adam, who argued strongly against reporting heavily on this, initially - in fact, still does argue that it's been far too heavily reported on - because if you actually look at what's in the emails, in terms of, you know, reportable material, there's awfully little there.
Damian Carrington: I think Fred's made it clear that the science hasn't changed. I want to leave time for the audience to be involved. I was just going to ask one more thing, which both Adam and yourself brought up, which was this idea of access to scientists. So Fred's argument has been that, you know, in society the internet has made information more available. The Guardian certainly, in particular, has had a campaign to free information. I mean, to put it back to you two, do you think it's defensible to say that we can't - this information is too dangerous to put in public hands?
Adam Corner: I don't think it's too dangerous, but, I mean, Fred's analogy was with a priesthood, and it creates this sense of something myst- I mean, there's no mystery about who can - who should be allowed to analyse and process this information. It's people who are qualified in that subject, no more and no less.
Damian Carrington: I think - McIntyre's qualified, he's a trained mathematician.
Fred Pearce: That's where I think you have problems. And I think there is a general public expectation that more material should be - for good or ill, and sometimes ill for short [?] - should be put out in - into a public arena in a form where amateur, if you like, scientists can contribute. It's a kind of - the world of the blogosphere, and so on. I think - I think that's part of the, if you like, social trend. As I say, for good or ill, I think it's there, and that's going to happen.
Did I think the BBC was lazy? I mean, the BBC are not alone, but I think there was quite a lot of lazy journalism, as you say, in just putting up the "hide the decline" phrase as if it kind of meant something. And I was pretty critical whenever, you know, people were doing that at the time. And I think that was - I think it was lazy, I think that is exactly the right word to use. It avoids - it's a way of - I mean, you can see why it happens. It's an easy way of saying "Here's something that you'll recognise about this issue." And, you know, they'll click it and people will say "Okay, I know what it's about. It's about that 'hide the decline'". So it has some resonance with people, but it doesn't actually give any information, or useful information. And it avoids the journalists, kind of, taking sides.
Damian Carrington: Fred, I just want to give -
Fred Pearce: So, I mean I think that's... Yeah, that's a problem. I think we had to report it. It was out there. I don't think you can say it was just in the blogosphere -
Adam Corner: I agree -
Fred Pearce: I don't think anything is just in the blogosphere any more, I really don't.
Damian Carrington: Myles?
Myles Allen: Okay, on the, sort of, disclosure thing, I think Steve McIntyre - just again, for the record - he's his own worst enemy. I mean, he issued us with a Freedom of Information - with one of these... You know, demanded all our climate change detection software. One of my long-suffering post-docs spent several weeks gathering it all together, putting it on a website. We sent him - told him where the link was. As far as we can tell, he never downloaded it. Okay? So, the point is: that distinguishes Steve McIntyre from, you know, a grad student in Omaha who writes to me and says he wants some bit of code which I've used. I send that graduate student that code, because he's a graduate student, he wants to do something constructive with it. I don't care what his political views are. He wants to do some science - he can have my code, he can have my data. You know, and that's the decision we take, as scientists. If you get somebody who doesn't actually want to play a constructive role in the science, and simply wants to - as was revealed in the exchange with - over the Yamal data, where he actually had all the data that he wanted, he had it for years, but he carried on banging in these Freedom of Information requests because he wanted to score points. You know, he actually had the data he was requesting. All along.
Damian Carrington: Myles, that's a point very well made. A point very well made, and people have to decide whether the scientists are the people to make those sorts of judgements. I do want to bring in the audience now. There are microphones available, and if you want to say who you are, that would be really helpful. This gentleman in the white jacket has been waving at me for some time, so we should let him...
Man 1: Can I just put some figures on this slide? I'd like to share your objections to it. That is not what - clearly it's not what the sceptics would say. It's also not what Phil Jones or the IPCC would say. What they would say is: look, the last 100 years, sea levels have risen 200 millimetres, that's that much. In the next 100 years, they will probably rise considerably more, like double that much. But there's a 50% plus or minus on that estimate, okay? That shows that the sea level has obviously risen about 5 metres there. That is what the IPCC say is likely. This is such a gross exaggeration - nobody would support it. I liked what you said, so right through to the very end, and you spoilt it at the end. Can I make a -
Damian Carrington: If you make a point about the climate emails, which is what we're here to discuss, that would be great.
Man in White Jacket: - to another of the speakers, who pointed out that most people - certainly in this country - would support the idea that there is global warming. Yes, quite true - anybody who has signed the Kyoto Agreement - and there are 174 countries did that - agrees there is climate change and it is man-made. Now, but I think you said "and we need to do something about it". Now, there you are absolutely wrong. There's an annex to the Kyoto Agreement -
Damian Carrington: I think we're getting into territory that's probably not pertinent, here.
Man in White Jacket: - 30 people have signed - 30 countries have signed, which means 80% of all the countries in the world do not propose to limit their emissions. They do not propose to do anything about it.
Damian Carrington: I would say thanks for your contribution, but we're here today to talk about the climate emails.
Man in White Jacket: - so it's not true that most people around the world want to do anything about it.
Damian Carrington: Thank you. Let's have some - let someone else have a go, now. Erm, let's go to the gentleman I know is Roger Harrabin.
Roger Harrabin: Yes, Roger Harrabin from the BBC. I just feel the need to defend the work of my colleagues and my institution. Richard Black, you know, he - sometimes even BBC journalists are compelled to display a slight sense of humour, perhaps whimsy. Richard Black is an excellent journalist, who's reported long and impressively in this area, and has not done a lot on climate change, I've done - on Climategate - I've done most of it. David Shukman would have been reporting on television and using that "hide the decline". I mean, I don't know if you know how many words you get in a television package on the 10 o'clock news. I don't know how many words you've just used. But just to give you an impression, David would have had probably between 300 and maybe 350 words to describe the complexities of an issue like this, to a mass audience who are probably eating hamburgers or, you know, tripping over the farting dog. [Laughter.] And I really think, you know, we need to - in television you need to find images. Now I agree with you, television is a substandard medium. I really do agree with you. But it is very difficult - I don't think we should blame the practitioners.
And if I may say, just briefly, that what I think is the significance of Climategate is: on the first afternoon, the Saturday afternoon, I sat and wrote a column about how, actually, I know lots of scientists and this would be pretty typical - this horrible sort of skulduggery - and actually, possibly there wasn't much very impressive here that would create an on-running story. Actually I revised that view, because this comment about the blogosphere being discrete, I think, is really important. The blogosphere now leaches in a continuum into the mainstream medium. If you read the Daily Telegraph, you'll find the Telegraph columnists lifting stuff straight from the blogosphere. And it goes from there.
You'll find the majority of the new Conservative Party intake, according to ConservativeHome, are not interested in climate change at all, and many of them are climate sceptics. So you cannot insulate the blogosphere. And if the blogosphere isn't insulated - and that sector of the electorate is not insulated - we in the BBC have to show that we are taking issues raised by a sector of our own audience seriously, too. So that's what we've attempted to do. And at the moment, I'm in the middle of writing a column about the investigations into Climategate. And I have to say, I'm approaching the authorities and they are not behaving in a way that suggests to me that they think anything has changed. It seems to me they think that everything has remained the same. And I'll leave the rest of my comments to my column, which will be out in the next couple of days.
Damian Carrington: We look forward to it, Roger. Thank you very much. I just want to give - Myles, do you want to respond to that, just for a moment?
Myles Allen: There was nothing - nothing obliged the BBC to flash up those words as this subliminal advertising. I think that was tantamount to libel. Because they knew that the words were going to be misinterpreted. So what you did - whenever you ran a story on Climategate, you flashed up the email with "hide the decline" in it, and you highlighted "trick" and "hide the decline". Okay? And you knew - BBC editors knew, David Shukman knew, that the word "trick" and the word [sic] "hide the decline" was going to be misinterpreted by anybody who happened to be not tripping over the dog and seeing the television at that time.
Now, I don't know the law of libel. But it seems to me that flashing up - you know, "Roger Harrabin is a" whatever, quickly on the screen and in a way that people might interpret it as negative to you is potentially libellous -
Damian Carrington: I think Roger mentioned the imperfection of television, and so... It's just I'm really conscious of people who want to ask questions. Thank you very much, Myles. I'm going to this lady up here, next, with the green cardigan. I've seen lots of you with hands up, and I will come to you.
Alice Bell: Hi, Alice Bell from Imperial College. On that "forcing lab doors open" point, I take Adam's point and response to Fred on that. But Harry Collins isn't - his take on expertise isn't an uncontroversial one, particularly in terms of thinking about science in public. And I'd like to emphasise that there's a difference, maybe, between doing science in public and being transparent, and necessarily involving publics [sic] in the science. And these are very different things, and there are different ways and different degrees you might do this in different contexts, and it would be appropriate for different types of science. We, maybe, need to be aware of that.
And I also wanted to say that this isn't necessarily a new issue, this idea of transparency. If we look at the post-BSE fallout - and a lot of the responses to that are maybe ones that we can think about now - so maybe, to put this in the form of a question, how is this different from BSE? How is it that Demos's See-Through Science report in - whenever that was, going to embarrass myself in front of my students, forgetting the date, the date it was published, early Noughties - how is that different? Why can't we just take that up? Why do we need new ways of thinking about peer review? Why does the Royal Society need an inquiry?
Damian Carrington: Anyone want to talk to that? Erm, Adam?
Adam Corner: I absolutely agree that there's a distinction between talking about handing out data to people, and public involvement and engagement in science, and my understanding of the reason why it's so important to engage and involve the public with science, is it's the broader questions around science, the "why" - "Why is this particular research programme being pursued? What are the implications of it?" Rather than any kind of sense that you want - you would want in any field or any discipline outside of science, or inside of science, to involve people who have no particular claim to be able to evaluate technical information. And I think that distinction's got to be really clear. Absolutely, more and more public engagement with science, but it's not the kind of engagement that would involve just handing over specialist information and saying "Make of that what you will".
Damian Carrington: Okay, thank you. I'm going to go -
Fred Pearce: Can I just briefly -
Damian Carrington: Sorry, go on, Fred.
Fred Pearce: The point about the Royal Society is we have Freedom of Information legislation, and the point that Myles made - which I agree with - is that it does change a lot. It is potentially changing a lot of rules. I think the science community has failed, over several years, to sit down and think: what does this mean for us? And one of the fallouts of not having done that, and not thought through what it means for science, has been this whole Climategate saga. A lot of those issues could actually have been resolved if the science community, the people at the top of the science community, had actually sat down, realised - as Phil Jones did, very early, that this would have an effect on his work - and said: okay, what are the new ground rules? How do we sort this out? Let's - who do we need to talk to, to work this out? So this is a real failure, on the part of the wider science community, to - if you like - address that early enough. And I think that it's going to have to be done some time, maybe the Royal Society's the best person [sic] - the best group - to do it.
Damian Carrington: Thank you, Fred. We'll go - next.
Oliver Morton: Hi. Oliver Morton at the Economist. I wanted to say how nice it was to be able to debate, where people talked about Harry Collins. But I also wanted to follow up on Adam's point. And so one of the problems that the sceptics and the McIntyre people have been having - and I think although I take Myles's point about Yamal, I think it is a genuine one - is that it's not all data but data on which published results are based, and for which various journals, including journals I've worked for, have archiving policies. I don't quite see how that archiving policy can then be used only for people who have a Masters degree. And if you think that the data on which science is based should be publicly archived, which journals claim to think, then you actually have to have that data publicly archived. And in some cases, that has not been the case. But the other point I wanted to ask Myles - I think you have a slightly rosy view of peer review, if you think it's been going on like this for 200 years, because it hasn't. Peer review in its modern form is a relatively modern invention. And it may well be true, although I don't know quite why you cast this calumny on astrophysicists, that climate scientists are particularly good and noble when they come to peer review. But the question I wanted to ask is: given the evidence of things like the conflict of interest that Fred flagged up, or the email where Tim says "I have to give this bad review and don't know how to - can anyone help me?" do you think the standards of peer review in climate science are in fact good enough, given that the societal impact of climate science is significantly greater than that of astrophysics?
Damian Carrington: A good question. Myles.
Myles Allen: Okay, I was quoting colleagues in astrophysics, who'd looked at the emails and said "This is ridiculous, and this has been regarded as outrageous", so I'm not - perhaps I should have made it very clear, I'm not suggesting that climate scientists are holier than astrophysicists, but simply that there's nothing especially sordid about what's going on in climate science. I mean, this is the to and fro of the scientific process. I think the key thing here is that the way - you're right, peer review - I left my notes on the table, so that's why I was, sort of, making comments ad lib, as regards when we invented peer review. But the point is, peer review - it's a bit like democracy, it's the worst of all possible systems except the alternatives. And at the moment, it does work. Yes, it requires editors to make judgements. And frequently editors will have to weigh up the fact that the greatest expert in the field, in an area, who clearly ought to be evaluating a paper, also has a vested interest in the outcome, because the paper is criticising the greatest expert in the world's work. That's a very common situation for a journal editor to face. And journal editors are humans. They make those judgements and they have a right to do so. And the suggestion that - of course, sometimes they get it wrong, that's the nature of people making judgements, they occasionally get them wrong, if you take away the ability to ever get a judgement wrong, then you take away the ability to make that judgement at all. So, you know, I think that's the problem here, is that these emails which you're quoting out as saying evidence that the whole peer review process is corrupt, are simply evidence that people are discussing the papers openly and honestly amongst themselves, and if, you know, the individual examples coming out of 15 years or so of email traffic don't actually amount to a great deal.
Damian Carrington: Thanks, Myles. Actually, I'm going to go to the next question. A gentleman here at the back.
Sandy Starr: My name's Sandy Starr. Am I the only person who's got a problem with Freedom of Information legislation? I'm no fan of, or apologist for, Phil Jones and his colleagues. I'm someone who is very sceptical about a lot of mainstream thinking about climate change, although I hope I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But there is one point on which I sympathise with Phil Jones, even though on many other respects I didn't. And that was his resistance to the Freedom of Information requests. And the reason for that - well, I don't think the Freedom of Information requests can be the proper way to hold a scientist or other authority figure to account. And the two problems I have with it - first, I think people need some space where they can deliberate and formulate things in private, before presenting them to their peers. And the Freedom of Information requests have a difficult and tense relationship with that fact. But also, although peer review clearly has problems - and I'm not intrinsically against looking for alternatives or supplements to it - I just don't think that Freedom of Information requests - or leaked emails, for that matter - are that useful alternative or supplement.
Damian Carrington: Okay. Well, let's take that. Adam, do you want to respond
Adam Corner: I think you're absolutely right. It feels like a real clash of cultures, and in some senses I'm sympathetic to both sides, in different ways - the legitimacy of Freedom of Information requests, but also the ability of something like science to be able to continue to
function without the constant threat of being held to ransom by McIntyre and his army of Freedom of Information requesters. And I think that's a really important point. Also I think that -
Damian Carrington: Can you just be clear what you mean by "held to ransom"? Because I mean, in a sense, they're saying "publish your data." Is that -
Adam Corner: Well -
Damian Carrington: "Held to ransom" seems -
Adam Corner: Myles's -
Damian Carrington: No, I - ask, so you can talk...
Myles Allen: When they came at us for the global change detection software, it sounds like, you know - it took him two minutes to write that email. It cost us at least a man-month to comply. And then, of course, he didn't even bother to look at it. He just, you know - all he wanted was to say that we hadn't complied. As soon as we did comply, it was total loss of interest - let's go and find someone else to bully. So, you know, as long as you've got -
Fred Pearce [?]: How do you know he didn't?
Myles Allen: Hmm?
Fred Pearce [?]: How do you know he didn't?
Myles Allen: We've got the URL records. I mean, he might have come at it by a Russian server or something, but I should say: as far as we can tell, he hadn't looked at it.
Fred Pearce [?]: [Inaudible.]
Myles Allen: Okay, okay. So I should -
Damian Carrington: Hang on - everybody, one at a time. Myles.
Myles Allen: We never got feedback [?] from him, we never learnt anything from the process, that's what I can say.
Fred Pearce: - £450, if it costs more than that, you can reject it. Are you saying that you spent more than £450 when you didn't have to?
Myles Allen: It's not that. He never actually - I should also make it very clear, because it's a very litigious field. He did not issue us with a Freedom of Information. This was a sort of pre - this was the pre-Freedom of Information gambit. Um, and we knew that what would happen if we didn't comply immediately was that we would be all over Climate Audit as obstructive climate scientists. And to avoid that threat, we obviously had to put the time in. And that's - you know, as many people pointed out, this gives an enormous amount of power to people who simply want to disrupt the operation of normal science.
Damian Carrington: Okay, you've made that point. I'm going to go - here.
Fiona Fox: Fiona Fox, director of the Science Media Centre. I just wonder whether the panellists think that, as we're coming to the end of this debate, whether we can finish on a more positive note and agree that this whole affair might deliver better journalism. And I think maybe you've got criticisms of Fred Pearce, but it wasn't like everything before then was perfect. And there was a huge amount of alarmism and climate porn and - I've chaired hundreds of SMC briefings and, you know, with the exception of some honourable journalists in this room, you could see the minute they got their story - you know, "beyond the tipping point", "worse than previously expected", "pictures from The Day After Tomorrow" out the door.
Since Climategate it's very different. Poor Peter Stott came in to talk to journalists about his Nature paper on attribution, and he was interrogated, scrutinised - "let's go back on that graph, let's go over it again". I think, in your area, I know more about fingerprinting than I ever probably will need to know. But, you know, he was exhausted but he was absolutely exhilarated, because he had been absolutely forced to defend his science. And his science will out. And all of your science will out. I really believe the science is strong enough to survive this, and we should embrace and champion that journalists are actually dealing with the uncertainties, scrutinising the scientists, and I think, you know, the fact is, where the science fails to come to win out, then we need to know about it. And actually, one thing we're missing with all of this, is that two out of three inquiries have exonerated these emails. Fred Pearce's entire book has found no smoking gun. So with this level of scrutiny, climate science has won out. We should be championing that, not arguing against this level of scrutiny, which always looks like "We don't want the journalists asking us the tough questions".
Damian Carrington: I'll ask Fred to respond to that. Do you think, you know, the whole affair of Climategate will change the way journalists like yourself do your business?
Fred Pearce: I think it will make a lot of people think about a lot of things. And I think that is true of scientists as well as journalists. I think it might produce better science, as well as better journalism.
Damian Carrington: Okay. We're running out of time, but we can probably squeeze in one or two... The gentleman there with the red patches on his jacket, please. Can someone just get a mike up? [Man starts to speak.] Just wait a second, makes it easier, just so everyone can hear it.
James Morgan: James Morgan, and I also work for BBC News Online with Richard Black, so I should declare that here - Freedom of Information, and all that. Myles, I was very interested that you see Climategate through the prism of - that it's a story about journalism and journalists, and I think there's a lot to be said about that. Journalists do, you know - have painted a very strong, compelling story one way and then another. But I think you're also painting a very strong, compelling story, and in criticising journalists for exaggerating, I think you're actually using the journalists' own tools to get back at them. So... But the question I have, a very direct question for you - it's not just going to be a rant - you seem to be, sort of, arguing the line that Phil Jones: well, he gave his data to any scientist who asked for it. It's just the bloggers and the baddies he didn't give his data to. But I think you're painting him in a very, sort of, heroic and noble light, here. I'd ask you directly - was Phil Jones wrong or right to email his colleagues and say "Please can you delete those emails"? Would you have done the same thing? Would you do the same thing in future, if some very nasty, mean and [inaudible] people, who were out to besmirch you and ruin your scientific name, put in a Freedom of Information request?
Damian Carrington: Myles, do you want to respond to that, or plead the Fifth?
Myles Allen: It's been stated by the Freedom of Information Commissioner, who appears to be able to say these things ex cathedra, that he was wrong. So I suppose I have to say he was wrong.
James Morgan [?] : It's not about what you have to say -
Myles Allen: No, no, he was wrong, because the Freedom of Information Commissioner has said that he was wrong. And therefore he was wrong. Because that's what "wrong" means, in this context. At the time -
[James Morgan is still speaking. Someone says "Answer the question!"]
Myles Allen: Okay. Morally -
Damian Carrington: Calm down, [inaudible, but sounds like "dude".]
Myles Allen: - I had no idea what the Freedom of Information Act meant until years after it came into force. I had absolutely no idea what - you know, that this had any implications for me whatsoever. My guess - as you say, Phil probably spotted it, the implications of it, much earlier than certainly most of the rest of us did. And, while he was clearly - while he clearly wasn't entitled to delete emails at the time, I could well believe, when I first heard about this, I thought: oh well, maybe I ought to delete all my old emails - first reaction. You know? I didn't write that down in an email, but my first reaction was: oh well. Or maybe I'd better make sure that I delete emails as soon as they come in, now. Or I wonder if there's a program out there which will just, sort of, you know, wipe my inbox every day, or something.
Damian Carrington: Very candid response, Myles. Thank you. I'm going to go to the gentleman at the back in black.
Man in Black: Hi. Can I make a very short point, before I ask the, sort of, question I want to ask, which is: why would it cost you anything to provide data to people, if you published all the data when you first published the papers that used it? But the actual point I want to make is more about... The most disturbing thing I've heard - and I hope other people are disturbed by it - is an argument which says that only experts should be allowed to interpret stuff. So science should become a new priesthood. [Audience applause.] Now, I don't want to give people a history lesson, but that's exactly what the Church used to say when they didn't allow the Bible to be published in languages people could read. And the fact that people started subversively releasing the document was one of the things which created the modern world. And it would worry me a lot less if I didn't think there were other threads in the debate about Climategate, but also other areas of science where it appears the commitment of scientists to defend truth and openness is quite weak in certain areas. So here we have - it's quite easy to publish stuff as long as it agrees with the consensus, because that's the way the peer review system - if it is done with a relatively small number of people - will tend to bias things. So we suppress the work we don't like, we allow easy publication of stuff with errors in it as long as it agrees with where we want to be. And that would worry me less if it wasn't also true in other important areas of science that affect public policy. So there are plenty of examples in epidemiology, where what we advise people to do with their health - it's quite hard to publish certain types of statistical evidence, because we've decided we know the answer and we will suppress evidence which says -
Damian Carrington: I think - you've made your point. Thank you very much. I'd like to give - Myles is a man who makes his living doing this thing. How do you distinguish between a bad paper and a paper that doesn't agree with the mainstream?
Myles Allen: Um, okay. There is no problem in science publishing results which conflict with the mainstream. In fact, it's much easier to publish a result which conflicts with the mainstream, and you get it into a high-profile journal, and you make a lot of noise. I mean, that - if I could find evidence that global warming was not happening, I would win a Nobel Prize, and deservedly so. So that's a myth, which is out there, which needs correcting. The key point - the point about distinguishing people who are participating in science from people who are from - outsiders, who are not participating in science - the proof of the pudding is - you can tell from what they're doing. So initially, Phil Jones was very receptive to Steve McIntyres's requests. But when Steve McIntyre moved into this audit mode, and was just, sort of, essentially moving around the world, deciding who to pick on next, that was when the community clammed up against him. I think if Steve McIntyre had handled things rather differently and had been a little less acerbic on his blog straightaway, I think he'd be a popular man in the community. He's a decent mathematician. I've got no problem with a lot of -
Adam Corner: Can I just make a really quick point?
Damian Carrington: Thanks, Myles. We're really running out of time, so very briefly, and then we're going to the man with the grey jumper there.
Adam Corner: I think the analogy with the priesthood is completely flawed. There's - the scientists are not trying to create a world view or a movement. They're conducting empirical research. [Audience applause.] And I think that is massively different.
Damian Carrington: Er, gentleman in the grey jumper. If you keep it brief, because we really are short of time, now.
Peter Murray-Rust: Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge, and a data libertarian. I came here with an open mind. I wanted to be able to give an accurate picture to science of what was going on here, what the issues were, where the data was, and so forth. Now, what I found here is something that seems to me something like a priesthood. That is, a set of people who feel that outside that, people can't judge. I understand things like computational science, I understand thermodynamics, I do not understand tree rings but feel that I would have something useful to say about data analysis here. And if I look at things like the genome - the genome was really hard fought, to get that out into the public domain. All the genomic data is in the public domain. Imagine what had happened if it was locked up in castles where you have to ask your friends to get the data out, and so on. I talk with a lot of editors of other journals in other subjects, and some share this problem about how you put out data, but there are other editors who will not publish science unless the data is fully deposited. Proteomics, bio-science, crystallography, disciplined astrophysics - they are insisting the data is published -
Damian Carrington: I think we are really out of time, so if you really just wrap up...
Peter Murray-Rust: The final comment that this is an area of global importance, it's not a backwater, and I'm surprised that people have not said there is a moral duty and an ethical duty to get this data out, for the human race.
Damian Carrington: Thank you for making that point. I'm going to come back to the panel, in a moment, for final words, just one last question. To the gentleman at the back there with the brown jumper, please. Right at the top, I'm afraid. If you could keep it brief, I'd appreciate it.
James Smee: I'll keep it brief. My name's James Smee, I work for a local authority in London, and we've been working with the Freedom of Information Act for many years, and I had to deal with an enquiry today about the number of axle numbers for every single council vehicle. I'd like to know why scientists should be immune from the same standards of Freedom of Information as every other public service in the country, when a lot of that information is created by public money. I haven't heard a single argument in favour of why science should have a lower standard of Freedom of Information than everybody else in this country.
Damian Carrington: Thank you. Right, on - we're just going to wrap up now, so I'm briefly going to ask Adam, then Myles and Fred to say some final words. Just a minute, please, on anything this evening that occurs to you.
Adam Corner: Just to try and respond to that, I think there's a danger that if science is thrown open in that way, that it could just grind to a halt in a func-
James Smee [?]: - that's what they'd say in every council, every local authority, every government department, social services -
Adam Corner: But I don't think - it's not true that no-one sees this data. It's not as if you publish on your own advice. It's peer-reviewed, and it's peer-reviewed by people who could legitimately be considered competitors to you. You know, they don't want - there's no desire, I don't think, to build a consensus. Would you -
Damian Carrington: Over to Myles.
Myles Allen: Yeah. Um, on that point, the way science works is by reproducing or refuting results. And ideally you don't want everybody to use the same data, because if you're going to test a result, you want other scientists to go out and get their own data and see if the result's good or not. Okay? That's actually something which we've completely lost sight of in this discussion. So I actually support free access to data, and so - but what I worry about is if it's applied in this blunderbuss way, that we seem to be - that potentially Freedom of Information may require it to be applied. A lot of science, because the data we deal with - although you say, you know, everybody has this problem, a lot of the data we deal with is very - um, ah - is very complex and potentially dangerous. If you release all the results of clinical trials and you get a headline in the following days saying, um, you know, "Five kids developed autism following the MMR vaccine", the result is, you know, deaths of children in five or six years' time. That's the danger with just throwing data out.
As you've made the point, data needs to be interpreted. We need to make it possible for people to examine the interpretation process - that's what science does. But simply - it's not at all clear that simply allowing every step in the interpretation process to be done in public is necessarily the right way to do that. Because in fact what will happen is that people will commit a great deal less to paper. People will commit a great deal less to email, because they're so terrified of the next Freedom of Information request, and the result will be worse, and less effective science than you would get otherwise. That's my fear, on this. Okay?
Damian Carrington: Thanks, Myles. I'm just going to leave it - Fred, with the final word, tonight.
Fred Pearce: Thanks. I think the data issue matters very much, in this case, because we are not dealing with an issue where it's easy to replicate data. It's not easy to reproduce Phil Jones' dataset, the Met Office's dataset. That is why some of these issues appear in quite an exaggerated form, because you're dealing with one dataset, and that data has to be open so that other people can interpret it. You can't go out and get - you can't do your own experiment in the lab and come up with your own findings and publish your paper. So it's a particular case with this - these large datasets of temperatures, where it matters greatly that data is made available. So that other people can scrutinise it.
But I think in general terms, I'm in favour of openness. I think openness is good and valuable, and we need to have as much of it as we sensibly can. It can be inconvenient, it can take time - handing out data, responding to requests, and so on. People can sometimes get hurt in the process. It can slow things down. It can, you know, disappoint people. But all institutions have to be - have to have an element of openness, and I think the science community has to address that much more. It's been traditionally rather closed, with its own rules of engagement - whether you call it a priesthood or not - its own rules of engagement, its institutional structure, and its own institutional inertias.
It's done a lot of good work, because a lot of those roles are quite good. And they are judged by results. But I think there is a need for greater openness. There is a need to try and open it up. And there is an urgency to make that happen. And I think if anything good can come out of all this, it is for somebody to try and address that. The Freedom of Information legislation as applied to science is a horrible, true, blunderbuss - it doesn't work very well, but the principles behind it are very sound. And as I said before, I think the science community has failed to address that and try and work its way through that. And if something good can come out of this, it really would be if scientists would sit down, think seriously about how they engage with the non-scientific community, how they share data, how they have dialogues - not at that public understanding of science as a sort of handing down information but actually having real debates about the purpose of science, the value of data. And if we get some of that out of this, then I think that would be really valuable.
Damian Carrington: It's a good note to finish on. I hope that all of you, whichever side of the argument you find yourself on, have enjoyed this evening and will thank these speakers for their contributions.
[Audience applause.]