Ignoring ‘Climategate’

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At first glance, Climategate’s leaked correspondence is the Dangerous Liaisons of the scientific world. Despite the drumbeat informing the public that science strongly supports the climate-change thesis, the leaked data paint a picture of a community of experts afraid of scrutiny, willing to use underhanded methods to silence doubters, and content to eliminate evidence that might undermine both their theories and their funding.

Yet the scandal has not led to serious policy reconsiderations or even significant stigmatization for many of the scientists and organizations implicated. Instead, even as fundamental suppositions about climate change were being challenged, the Environmental Protection Agency took initial steps to implement the most extensive carbon-emissions regulations the United States has ever seen. And only a few weeks afterward, the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, with 192 countries in attendance, began without meaningfully addressing the Climategate e-mails.

The extent of the planet’s warming and the idea that an increase in its temperature is the fault of humankind are matters that scientists may be able to prove decisively someday. But the Climategate e-mails show that, for now, the evidence is far from conclusive. For all the talk about the need for public policy about warming to be governed by science, Climategate illustrates that the belief in global warming may be rooted less in detached science than in the West’s uneasy conscience about capitalism and development.

Those skeptics who argue that the environmental alarmism on display at Copenhagen and elsewhere is the product of a modern pantheistic faith and not the result of empirical reasoning must be taken seriously. The best that can be hoped for in the aftermath of Climategate is that the community that cares about science will live up to the purpose of its studies: to ask questions and observe the evidence with cold eyes. 

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