Scientists Are Human After All

Simon Jenkins, columnist for the Guardian newspaper of England, writes about climatologists:

So scientists are human after all. They are no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity, especially when a cheque or a plane ticket is on offer. As for self-criticism, that is for you, not me.

I am just ready to believe that the antics of the climate change scientists, revealed in this week's Guardian and elsewhere, have no impact on the facts of global warming. But then I must rely on those same scientists to say so. The Yamal-12 larches may be dodgy, the hockey stick limp and the Amazon stats subject to re-evaluation. The date of 2035 for a Himalayan apocalypse may have been a misprint for 2350 and 40,000 comments didn't spot it. But so what, they all say? The world is coming to an end because we are scientists and, like Nostradamus, we know.

What any layman must find alarming is the paranoia and exclusivity of the climate change community. The preparation of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was apparently like that of a party manifesto. Data was suppressed and criticism ignored. The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed sceptics as adherents of "voodoo science". Dark hints were made of commercial interest and Holocaust denial.

Now barely a week passes without another of the "thousands and thousands of papers" Pachauri calls in evidence having its peer-review credentials questioned. Their authors may plead that the evidence remains strong and theirs is no more than what lawyers call "noble cause corruption". Anyone reading the University of East Anglia emails might conclude they would say that, wouldn't they. Yet Pachauri this week issued a Blairite refusal of all regrets for the chaos into which his sloppiness has plunged his organisation.

Climatology is not the only scientific discipline whose dirty linen is flapping in the wind. The wildly exaggerated flu scares promoted over the past decade by virologists and their friends in government have so undermined trust in epidemiology that people are refusing flu vaccination. In the case of the MMR scare, it took London's Royal Free Hospital a shocking 10 years to investigate the scientists responsible, and the General Medical Council to discipline them.

Two decades of uncritical flattery appear to have eroded what should be science's central tenets: questioning evidence and challenging assumptions. In the bizarre case of the Himalayan glacier, enough climate change believers wanted cataclysm to be true for none of them to question the evidence, however implausible. Hence the scientist who told a New York Times reporter: "You are about to experience 'the Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you."

My acceptance of the human causation of global warming has, as yet, not been dimmed by the shenanigans of the IPCC or the chicanery of the University of East Anglia. Nor is the reality of flu undermined by the World Health Organisation and its allies in the drugs industry. Nor should stem cell research be balked by the shortcomings of peer review. I can read the material myself.

What is alarming is the indifference of the leaders of science to the damage done to their cause. The top professional body, The Royal Society, has shown no inclination to judgment on the climate change controversy. Its ­website remains a bland cheerleader for the IPCC alarmists. The Royal Society took no steps of which I am aware to investigate the scandal of pandemic epidemiology, or the allegations against stem cell peer review. Ethics is not a strong suit of so-called big science. It gets in the way of money.

Science demands, and gets, a weight of expectation. It wants the public to regard its role in society and the economy as axiomatic – with no obligation to prove it. Government buys into this. While the humanities and even social sciences are dismissed as "consumption goods", science is an "investment in our future". A student of English or history is a drone, but a student of science is a hero of the state.

If global warming is as catastrophic as its champions in the science community claim – and as expensive to rectify – its evidence must surely be cross-tested over and again. Yet it has been left to freelancers and wild-cat bloggers to challenge the apparently rickety temperature sequences on which warming alarmism has been built.

I regard journalism as fallible and its regulation inadequate. But at least, like most professions, it has some. Only when science comes off its pedestal and joins the common herd will it see the virtue in self-criticism. Until then, sceptics must do the job as best they can.