Nature sees no reason to investigate climate papers

Nature weighs in on the story of the emails stolen from East Anglia University.

By Chris Lee
As has been well discussed on Ars, private e-mail from servers of the Climate Research Unit were recently made public and, since then, many people who were skeptical or dismissive of climate change have been having a field day. In these private conversations, the scientists revealed themselves to be petty, vengeful, emotional, and, well, human.

Additionally, we see that science-in-process is a messy business with many a prat-fall between inspiration and publication. Unfortunately, the people most keen in analyzing these emails seem unable to distinguish prat-falls, tests, mistakes, and just plain stupid ideas from the actual research and data that emerged from the CRU as published work. Now, although most of us realize this, the major scientific publications are starting to weigh in with their take on the whole affair.

The general consensus among scientists is that the revelations don't change the science at all. The conclusions about anthropogenic global warming are derived from multiple sources of independent data and analysis. Even if it turned out that everything from the CRU were false, it would not actually change the conclusions, because it is only one source among many. And, as the Nature editorial argues, there isn't much there to suggest that the CRU's published works are false.

But—and the general thrust of the editorial in Nature supports this—we have a disaster on our hands. Just as the world governments appear to be showing a willingness to take action (and this is mostly because the US government seemed to be about ready to play ball), anyone seeking to avoid policy changes has been given more of a platform from which to shout. And those people, including US Senator James Inhofe and Saudi Arabian diplomats, have indeed latched onto the e-mails.

So, what appears to be happening is that documents that don't seem to speak to the science are being used to derail an attempt to develop policies that are based on the conclusions of the scientific community. All in all, not a win for critical thinking.