Listen to the man
Viewpoint May 25th, 2008
Pat Frank on the behaviour of climate scientists:
As an experimental scientist, I could never ethically hold back the parts of a valid data set that disconfirm my own published results. Cherry-picking what part of some results to publish and what part to withhold so as to promote a particular ouutcome is the deepest betrayal possible of scientific ethics, with the possible exception of outright wholesale fabrication. And really, conscious and tendentious data pruning is to fabricate a result, and really to withhold a valid part of the data is to also fabricate the data set.
That said, what you have discovered and experienced on the part of these scientists is not “prima donna” behavior. I’ve known prima donnas in science, and I don’t know one that has systematically and consciously gated data to publish only stuff that confirms a pre-desired result. To do so is to falsify.
The fault in climate science is widespread. The social outlook in climate science has shifted so far into insanity that in context it seems ethically OK to these people to cherry-pick what to publish, and to withhold disconfirming results. The other half of the offense is that institutional bodies have failed to enforce their own rules meant to prevent exactly such behavior. But institutions are really just people sitting at desks, and it’s clear that many of these people share the same skewed social outlook.
This trend in outlook is, in science, an example of the sort of social trajectory brilliantly described by Hannah Arendt in her treatise on the banality of evil. When social context alone defines normalcy, then ordinary behavior can slide into insanity without anyone noticing. This is what’s happened in climate science.
Those scientists who have a strongly internalized set of ethics have withstood the trend and remained sane. The rest have tipped over the edge. This is the reason, I think, that so many can behave with apparently complete sincerity. They are legitimately sincere and from the perspective inside that social context, they have done everything right.
Their behavior is a lesson for us all in the real value of objective standards. If we didn’t have them, there’s be no judging the legitimacy of subjective judgments. But we do have them, and they unambiguously validate your case.
That’s what gets me about the global warming debate – why do the scientists involved have to behave in such a disreputable manner, when if the evidence was really on their side they would open the books, the methods and invite all and sundry to check the calculations?
