Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 235

Climate change science was called into question in 2009, when the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK had its email system hacked and around 1,000 emails, including exchanges between members of the unit and colleagues around the world, were published on the worldwide web – an affair now known as ‘ClimateGate’.

In some of these emails, the director, Professor Phil Jones, referred to performing ‘a trick’ with climate data and talked of ‘hiding the decline’ in temperature for one data series. He also admitted refusing repeated requests to share data with critics and asking a colleague to delete all emails relating to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment. Jones later argued that the email comments were taken out of context; the ‘trick’ was simply finding a creative way of joining two datasets, while ‘hiding the decline’ meant correcting a false impression in one dataset by making a composite set that also included instrumental data (BBC 2010).

Sceptics see this episode as supportive of their case that many climate scientists, whose careers and reputations have become intertwined with proving anthropogenic global warming, are prepared to sacrifice key scientific principles of openness and peer review in order to protect themselves and their ‘unproven’ thesis. Then, in 2010, after criticism from glaciologists, the vicechair of the IPCC admitted that a claim in the 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers ‘could disappear by 2035’ was wrong. Mistakes such as this, say sceptics, raise the issue of how many other IPCC predictions are incorrect, calling the existence of global warming into question.

‘ClimateGate’ was the subject of three independent inquiries: a parliamentary inquiry, a university inquiry into eleven key scientific papers, and a university-commissioned inquiry led by a senior civil servant, Sir Muir Russell, into the hacked and leaked email exchanges. All three found no evidence of scientific malpractice, falsification of data or attempts to subvert the peer review process. However, the Russell Review (Russell 2010: 10–11) did criticize the unit for being unhelpful and defensive when requests for data were made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. It also criticized the university and the unit for failing to appreciate the statutory requirements of the FoI Act and the potential damage that could be caused to climate science research and the university itself by withholding data. A separate review of the IPCC’s main forecasts, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2010, found no errors that might call into question the finding that anthropogenic climate change was occurring.