So the hacked emails simply provide a snapshot of the frustrations that many scientists experience when they interact with the public debate and the media and find that arguments are framed not on the basis of the strength of the evidence presented, but instead on the rhetorical skill of the protagonists.Ward is either uninformed or purposely employing some "rhetorical skill" as he is misrepresenting what the emails actually say.
In a letter published on Saturday in the FT I respond:
Ward, who serves as a spin doctor for the climate science community, does not seem to realize that if you are caught out in public saying things that are demonstrably untrue, then your credibility will suffer. Even though Ward is a PR official at LSE, his statements reflect poorly on the Grantham Institute which employs him and the climate science community more generally.From Prof Roger Pielke.
Sir, Bob Ward’s letter (December 3) explains that the unauthorised publication of emails from the University of East Anglia “simply” shows scientists expressing frustration at the irrationality of political debates. Unfortunately, the emails cannot be explained away so innocently. For instance, one exchange shows two lead authors of the 2007 assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conspiring to keep peer-reviewed research that I had led from being cited in their chapter on extreme events. Our work had challenged their views on the subject of hurricanes and climate change.
This exchange, and others, revealed scientists in influential positions exhibiting an unhealthy orientation toward influencing political debates as well as making decisions about science based on rather petty academic rivalries. Of course, such dynamics are always a risk when science meets politics, which is why major scientific assessments are, in principle, designed to minimise the outsized influence of a small clique of contributors.
As Christopher Caldwell (“Why Climategate is a catastrophe for good science”, November 26) explained in the column to which Mr Ward was responding, trust in science is a matter of the credibility and legitimacy of scientific organisations that represent the authority of science in public settings. Denial of the troubling issues raised by the emails – as Mr Ward has done – will not make the problems of the IPCC go away, much less contribute to renewed trust in the institutions of climate science.
Roger Pielke, Jr, Professor, Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, US
Do the folks who routinely adopt an approach based on heavy spin really take the public for fools? It is a bad strategy to take, as the public is far smarter than they are often given credit.
7 comments:
All people are vulnerable to corruption in the exception, tempted by dreams of physical, material, and ego instant gratification. Let's hope that this latest exhibition is only that. The potential of science and scientific enterprise to elevate the human condition should not be underestimated. We cannot afford for individuals to exploit and abuse its perceived authority for their satisfaction.
n.n.,
There is no way that a significant number of scientists have not taken personal advantage of the huge and growing largesse of the public to fund them and have done so in less than ethical ways.
Human nature is what it is, and scientists are not a "neo-h.sapiens."
The seeming endless confidence they and their supporters have in telling us we have no business looking and to just move on is an old unoriginal story that always ends badly.
I think you have won this round fair and square, and I suspect you won all your other rounds too. I fear that Mr Ward has not in general been either a credit or a help to the institutions who have employed him for his bluster and assurance. As you say, it is not a great idea to keep taking us, the public, for fools. We are able to watch, to think, to learn, and to remember. And the internet is a far greater help to those with truth on their side than it is to those without it.
"Do the folks who routinely adopt an approach based on heavy spin really take the public for fools? It is a bad strategy to take, as the public is far smarter than they are often given credit."
The public in general is far smarter in general than they're given credit for, but could it be compatible with that that, in the climate discussion, when someone like Ward spins heavily in his direction, or others spin heavily toward the other extreme, that their primary intent might not be to address, inform, or sway the whole audience, but rather to kind of maintain a population of generally intelligent people who are at this point inclined to a confirmation-bias that greatly reduces their thresholds for acceptance of information/spin/stories from certain messengers or along certain comfortable, existing narratives?
In Sunday’s Spectator the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker recounts Ward’s apparent misrepresentations during a 2009 kerfuffle.
I write “apparent misrepresentations” because as a not-so-innocent bystander I do not know whether Ward was attempting to mislead by using the B&W chart or if he was unaware that the color chart utterly destroyed his argument. It certainly does seem that he should know the difference, so his intentions were far from pure.
It would be nice if one could ignore such folks, but unfortunately each of their screeds must be shown for what they truly are: prevarications.
kmye,
You make an excellent observation.
A corollary is that a group of interesting people who are not science educated but are trusted spokespersons are making a lot of jack doing that maintenance work.
Think of Ward, Mooney and Gore.
It is interesting that the risk associated with the emails is characterized in such opposing ways. It is further interesting as to who speaks up in the defense of the emails and I suppose the IPCC generally. It is perhaps telling of the precarious nature that some have set up for themselves (and by extension society in general) by developing financial markets on constructed belief systems about climate change risk rather than something less vulnerable to say, Caldwell's "universal truth" of human error. As belief systems change so too does the meaning of its most prized symbols, for instance, the trustworthiness of IPCC. This can prove very expensive for institutions betting on, in effect, symbolic consistency, such as the UNEP-FI, odd university departments pushing policy under the guise of education, and those peddling multi year loss predictions whose worth depends upon belief in the value of such estimates (my, Ward does have the most intriguing of backgrounds).
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