Preface: saving climate science

Abstract

Climate science has long been in trouble and I wish to help it with this book. As the climate scientist Michael E. Mann (2012) vividly recounts in his autobiography, the ‘climate wars’ and heated public disputes about the accuracy of climate science originated in the early 1990s when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first report summarising the scientific evidence of climate change for policy-makers. As Mann also narrates in first person, the most malicious personal attack on climate science occurred in November 2009, when thousands of private emails and documents sent and received by prominent climate scientists (including Mann himself) were stolen and published online. The anonymous hackers justified this ominous attack by saying, ‘We feel the climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, codes and documents. Hopefully, it will give some insights into the science and the people behind it’ (Pearce, 2010: 166). The hackers indeed succeeded in opening the workings of climate science to the public. For months, the climate scientists whose emails had been stolen were the focus of media attention and were investigated by multiple university and parliamentary inquiries under allegations of obstruction to open access to scientific data and failures of objectivity in peer-review and research assessment. The hacking and its aftermath, as the House of Commons admitted in its inquiry report, were a ‘traumatic and challenging experience for all involved and to the wider world of science’ (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2010: 33). The authority of climate scientists has been eroded since the turn of the twentyfirst century by what seems to be a more general phenomenon: what happens inside many sciences has become visible to a highly educated and self-confident citizenry, as television and the Internet have opened up once exclusive and hidden spaces to public scrutiny (Collins, 2014; Gregory and Miller, 1998). The challenge faced by climate scientists is depicted in a cartoon published in The Economist shortly after the hacking (Figure P.1): the robust stock of knowledge that has been privately generated and validated by thousands of climate scientists for years (represented by a fortified tower of IPCC reports in the cartoon) is now under direct assault and surveillance from outside experts (as seen by the fact that these outsiders wear laboratory coats in the cartoon).