Science and the Suppression of Really Inconvenient Truth

Some stories about the hacking of the East Anglia CRU are now circulating. Fox, I understand, has picked up on the story, and Drudge has it up. I think the Telegraph was one of the first to carry much information. The BBC acknowledged the hack but did not carry any of the information from the leaked documents. This story from the Daily Mail seems to be a bit of a Molotov cocktail since it carries the accusation of “massaged temperature data” right up front. This is the first thing that set me off when I saw some of the emails yesterday as the writer talked about using “Mike’s trick” (apparently Michael Mann of the hockey stick graph) of adding “real temperatures” to the data to “hide the decline”.

Scientists, unless they work in the corporate world, have a great deal of their research funded by governments and related entities. When one deals with the government, one has to speak the language of government and trade in some degree of politicking to be successful. All scientists are human – at least the ones of which I am aware, and they necessarily bring to their work a viewpoint and a belief system. The people I know at work – engineers, technicians, and managers – are mostly honest people, I would say, representative of the general population. As a whole, scientists are probably representative of the general population and mostly honest as well.

The current global warming scandal is one that illustrates something I had considered often. Though I tend to believe scientists are mostly honest, I think they, just like the rest of us, ignore those bits of information that make them uncomfortable. Having a PhD in molecular biology does not automatically make one a better person than, say, having a JD from Harvard, or a BS (how appropriate) in journalism from MU, an MBA from Yale, or a DD from Southwestern Theological Seminary. There’s no real reason to think that a smarter man is a better man. No one really advances that argument. Rather the scientific community insists that the integrity of science stems from its methodology. Investigators are required to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals in ways that permit replication of the results and critiquing of techniques by the larger population of experts in a given field.

The emails from the CRU strike at the root of this methodology. There is nothing in the documents I have seen that gives any indication that Anthropogenic Global Warming was “made up” out of thin air. The globe did get warmer for a few years after the very cool period in the 1940’s. Nothing indicates the investigators do not believe that AGW is real. That’s part of the problem. What the emails do show is that there is a certain amount of collusion among investigators. They are willing to play fast and loose with the data -- doctor it a little when necessary to better reinforce their beliefs – both in terms of making it look more like warming correlates to human activity and with regard to the overall validity of the analysis. They show a petty and unscientific desire to silence dissenters. There is evidence of a reluctance to have the data thoroughly examined by those skeptical of AGW. The researchers do not want to do anything that will enable critical reviews. They were willing to sacrifice scientific integrity on behalf of activism. One email specifically shows the investigators colluding to control debate on their climate research website.

Back when I was a kid, in the dark ages, one of the tropes of pulp-ish science fiction was the scientist who discovered some dangerous truth or invented some potentially devastating device. The clichéd question would be, “What if it fell into the wrong hands?” The reason for that question is people used to understand that simply being able to do something does not mean that it is a good idea to do it. Science should have some external ethical control.

It’s the same thing as civilian oversight of the military. Politicians have screwed up a number of wars by not allowing the military more freedom in doing what needed to be done. I would argue that is exactly why Vietnam turned out the way it did. The military won on the ground. The politicians and the journalists threw away victory. We are very close to doing the same thing in Afghanistan, having narrowly avoided it in Iraq. Generals know the definition of military victory. Political victory, however, may be something very different. Despite the drawbacks and frequent stupidity involved, I know that it is necessary to have the civilian President as the Commander-in-Chief and not allow the military to operate independently.

The same is true of science. Science is a method of acquiring knowledge. It has no means of determining, scientifically, if that knowledge is good or bad. Good or bad means nothing to science as a method. Science knows only if something works or doesn’t work. That is a very limited understanding of truth. Something can be small ‘t’ true and still be very bad.

To be sure, the leaked documents from the CRU show that within the scientific community, and among these climate researchers in particular, there is an internal, guiding ethic. They really do want to “save the planet”, which is, of course, all well and good as far as it goes. The problem is that they see individualism, along with the capitalist-fueled excesses of Western Civilization in the developed nations, and the United States especially as being the main culprit of environmental destruction. In a way that might be true. One is tempted, though, to say, “Them’s the evolutionary breaks, bud.” It’s kind of like the bumpersticker that says, “I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to eat tofu.”

These scientists see human population growth and increasing life spans as a sort of cancer on the planet. Humanity is consuming more and more of the available resources at an ever-faster rate. The whole ecology of Earth is threatened and humanity itself along with it. When someone in climate studies found that the planet had increased in temperature over a few years, and that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has increased slightly, the scientific community concluded they had found the way to halt the proliferation of humanity and the destruction of the planetary ecology. The burning of energy-rich fossil fuels increased CO2. If CO2 were a “greenhouse gas”, then energy production would be a factor in increasing the temperature of the Earth by trapping the sun’s heat under the carbon dioxide. Suddenly, environmental activism was wed to climate science. If fossil fuel use could be curtailed through various means, including putative taxation, the effect would be to slow, or possibly even reverse population growth and resource depletion by those notorious unwashed masses of humanity.

Science is claiming that we need more control on our activity, more limitations on our individual freedoms and our ability to live as we like. Scientists appear to believe that for the greater good of both the human population and the planet they should be involved in governing.

I’m willing to give these scientists the benefit of the doubt regarding their intentions. They may genuinely believe that what they are doing is necessary to save the planet. What I’m not willing to give them is control over my life. I’m sorry, but the “greater good” argument doesn’t cut it with me, especially when I see supposedly objective researchers touching up their data to advance their agenda. Science seems to think that it should be the arbiter of humanity’s future. Rule by elite scientistic oligarchs appeals to me no more than rule by any other flavor of elite oligarchs.

But thanks for playing.