CRU: How to stifle scientific debate

[NB Author's note: I am not the Devil, merely a minor minion]

While DK is on the road, I'll take the liberty of pointing readers in the direction of two unmissable posts on the unfolding Climategate scandal. First up is a superb piece at Climate Skeptic which warns of the dangers of the monoculture or groupthink that has grown up around AGW. In particular, Warren considers the idea of "peer review", which alarmists constantly brandish as proof of the indisputability of their findings:

Peer review was never meant as a sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on scientific work. It is not a guarantee of correctness. It is really an extension of the editorial process — bringing scientists from relevant fields to vet whether work is really new and different and worthy of publication, to make sure the actual article communicates the work and its findings clearly, and to probe for obvious errors or logical fallacies.

Climate scientists have tried to portray peer review as the end of the process– ie, once one of their works shows up in a peer-reviewed journal, the question addressed is “settled.” But his is never how science has worked. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning, not the end. Once published, scientists attempt alternatively to tear it down or replicate its conclusions. Only work that has survived years of such torture testing starts to become “settled.”

The emails help to shed light on some aspects of peer review that skeptics have suspected for years. It is increasingly clear that climate scientists in the monoculture have been using peer review to enforce the orthodoxy. Peer review panels are stacked with members of the club, and authors who challenge the orthodoxy are shut out of publication, while authors within the monoculture use peer review as a shield against future criticism. We see in the emails members of the monoculture actually working to force editors who have the temerity to publish work critical of the orthodoxy out of their jobs. We are now learning that when alarmist scientists claim that there is little peer-reviewed science on the skeptic’s side, this is like the Catholic Church enforcing a banned books list and then claiming that everything in print supports the Church’s position.

History teaches us that whenever we allow a monoculture - whether is be totalitarian one-party rule or enforcing a single state religion, corruption follows. Without scrutiny of their actions, actors in such monocultures have few checks and little accountability. Worse, those at the center of such monocultures can become convinced of their own righteousness, such that any action they take in support of the orthodoxy is by definition ethically justified.

This, I think, is exactly what we see at work in the Hadley [sic] emails.

I think that's exactly right. And for a more in-depth look at the emails themselves we can go over to Watt's Up With That, where Willis Eschenbach takes us on a fascinating and disturbing trip along just one thread of the CRU emails, in which he asks UEA to release a list of the meteorological stations used in the preparation of the HadCRUT3 global temperature average, and the raw data for those stations. In response, UEA essentially tell him to go and fuck himself.

Eschenbach takes us through his sequence of letters and FOI requests to the university, and juxtaposes the unhelpful responses he gets with the emails flying around behind the scenes in which the climate scientists are urging each other to batten down the hatches and give nothing away. It's a long post, but I strongly recommend it to you if you haven't already seen it.

in 2005 Warwick [Hughes, climate researcher] asked Phil for the dataset that was used to create the CRU temperature record. Phil Jones famously replied:

Subject: Re: WMO non respondo
… Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. …
Cheers Phil

Hmmm … not good. Or as they say in “1984″, double-plus ungood. Science can only progress if there is a free exchange of scientific data The scientific model works like this:

* A scientist makes claims, and reveals the data and methods he used to come to his conclusions.

* Other scientists who don’t agree attack the claim by (inter alia) seeing if they can replicate the result, using the first scientist’s data and methods.

* If the claims cannot be replicated, the claim is adjudged to be false.

Obviously, if the data or the methods are kept secret, the claims cannot be verified. Attacking other scientist’s claims is what what scientists do. This adversarial system is the heart of science. Refusing scientific data because someone will attack it is an oxymoron, of course they will attack it. That’s what scientists do.

That's what they're supposed to do, certainly...

UPDATE: More good news, this time from the Daily Mash.