‘Climategate’
February 24th, 2010According to the BBC news website. Science has been damaged by the recent ‘Climategate’ accusations. Do you still trust our scientific advisor’s? We’d love to hear your thoughts about this and any other Environmental issues you feel strongly about.
Science damaged by climate row says NAS chief Cicerone By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News,20 Feb 2010
Leading scientists say that the recent controversies surrounding climate research have damaged the image of science as a whole.
President of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, said scandals including the “climategate” e-mail row had eroded public trust in scientists. His comment came at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego. Dr Cicerone joined other renowned scientists on a panel at the event.
‘Distrust has spread’
He said that the controversial e-mail exchanges about climate change data had caused people to suspect that scientists “oppressed free speech”.
His fellow panel members, including Lord Martin Rees, president of the UK’s Royal Society, agreed that scientists needed to be more open about their findings.
“There is some evidence that the distrust has spread,” Dr Cicerone told BBC News. “There is a feeling that scientists are suppressing dissent, stifling their competitors through conspiracies.”
Recent polls, including one carried out by the BBC, have suggested that climate scepticism is on the rise. Dr Cicerone linked this shift in public feeling to the hacked e-mails and to recently publicised mistakes made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in one of its key reports.
‘More transparency’
He said he was convinced that these events had had a wider knock-on effect. “Public opinion polls are showing that the answers to questions like: ‘how much do you respect scientists?’ or ‘are they behaving in disinterested ways?’, have deteriorated in the last few months.” He said that this crisis of public confidence should be a wake-up call for researchers, and that the world had now “entered an era in which people expected more transparency”. “People expect us to do things more in the public light and we just have to get used to that,” he said. “Just as science itself improves and self-corrects, I think our processes have to improve and self-correct.”
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8525879.stm
Mike Close Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 10:39 am
I think that “Climategate” as it has been dubbed has been blown completely out of proportion. The timing was bad with the story breaking on the eve of the copenhagon summit leading to a great deal of sensationalism in some areas of the media. This in turn is what has created wide scale sceptism amongst society.
I dont think it would be right to tar the science community with the same brush even if it does come to light that the information has been fiddled to suite a cause. This is clearly a massive misjudgement of error and the scientists concerned should be discredited.
The damaging side of “Climategate” though is that a falacy seems to hvae been created that within the science community the very existence of climate change is in dispute, this is of course not true, scientists agree that it exists and there is a whole host of evidence to back this up. What is disputed is the extent of the issue and what needs to be done about it. Climate Change does not become a complete sham overnight just as the holocaust was not heralded as lies when it was dubbed a hoax.