SCIENCE AS POLITICS; SCIENCE AS RELIGION

• First, science as politics.  In the end of November, stolen electronic files from servers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a world famous center at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain were made public.  The leaked files contain over 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the CRU.  For example, in one of the email exchanges, Phil Jones, the CRU director, wrote a colleague that he would “hide” a problem with data from Siberian tree rings with more accurate local air temperature measurements.  Further, Jones writes another colleague at Penn State University (Michael Mann) and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC [the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, which represents the global consensus view on climate change.  He writes that “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report.  Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is.”  In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree.  “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues to no longer submit to or cite papers in this journal. . . I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”  For anyone who is intellectually honest, these kinds of emails raise profoundly disturbing questions.  Can any one honestly imagine these kinds of exchanges if the subject were AIDS research or breast cancer research?  The explosion would be unimaginable!  These email messages and documents raise three important questions:  (1)  whether these scientists shielded raw data, gleaned from tree rings and other indirect indicators of climate conditions?  (2)  Do these emails and documents prove that data used to buttress the argument for global warming is suspect?  (3)  Did certain climate scientists try to prevent the publication of scientific papers by climate skeptics?  The answer to the first and third questions is yes.   Question number two is no.  What these emails and documents reveal is a group of scientists engaging in hard politics and abandoning their professional, scientific objectivity for a cause!  The dominant themes of these documents reveal, what columnist Michael Gerson suggests, is an attitude that “insiders can question, if they don’t go too far.  Outsiders who threaten the movement are ‘idiots.’”  The professional scientists involved in this scandal (and that is what it is) demonstrate a lack of professional objectivity, so necessary for the pursuit of science.  Gerson writes:  “This professional objectivity is precisely what the hacked emails call into question.  Some of these scientists are merely activists, deeply invested in a predetermined outcome.  They assume that political change is the goal; the scientific enterprise is the means—like a political ad or campaign speech.  But without trust in disinterested, scientific judgments on climate, most non-scientists will resist costly, speculative, legislative actions.  When the experts become advocates, no one believes the experts or listens to the advocates.”  As Daniel Henninger argues, “For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science.  Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science.”  That is at least now called into question. Furthermore, the East Anglia scandal demonstrates the predisposition toward Postmodernism in certain dimensions of science.  The formal structures of the scientific method are now replaced with raw subjectivity.  Ideology is driving the conclusion of a scientific theory, not the data.  A new scientific ethos of “close enough” to the truth is now satisfactory.  “Close enough” science is hardly adequate in the pursuit of political goals and public policy.  The East Anglia scandal is dangerous and must be confronted honestly and openly.  We cannot be pursuing public policy that is supposed to be rooted in objective science, when the facts illustrate that, at least for some in science, ideology is driving the conclusion, not the data.  One of the most revealing emails states that “the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment [the current the ‘moment’ is over 10 years in length] and it is a travesty that we can’t.”  That is not a scientific judgment; that is an ideological one.

• The second thesis of this Perspective is that science can in fact be a religion for some.  Their convictions and beliefs are so consuming that they defend them and articulate them with a “religious” fervor.  Quite unbelievably, this fervor has received the sanction of the court system of England.  In July 2008, Tim Nicholson was dismissed from his job at a property management firm because of his deeply held convictions about global warming.  He argued that global warming is “the most important issue of our time” and that “nothing should stand in the way of diverting this catastrophe.”  For him, “Belief in man-made climate change is . . . . a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values.”  He therefore sued his former employer and won.  The judge in the case wrote that “a belief in man-made climate change . . . is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose” of laws covering discrimination in employment.  The deep-seated convictions of someone who believes in climate change now have legal protection and can sue for discrimination in Great Britain.  It is quite probable that a similar ruling will come in an American court.  In 1941 the US Supreme Court altered the definition of freedom of religion.  It broadened the definition in a now famous case, the Kauten case on conscientious objection to war, when it argued that “Conscientious objection may justly be regarded as a response of the individual to an inward mentor, call it conscience or God, that is for many persons at the present time the equivalent of what has always been thought a religious impulse.”  Freedom of religion was significantly altered from a substantive reference point (what you belief about God, morality and worship) to a psychological function of belief.  James Davison Hunter argues that this 1941 case formally embraced “nontheistic, in particular, secularist ideologies within the shelter of protection provided by the First Amendment.”  It is not difficult to imagine the US courts agreeing with the British court on global warming as a “religious” belief that needs legal protection against discrimination.

See Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post (22 November 2009); David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post (5 December 2009); Andrew Revkin in the New York Times (28 November 2009); Michael Gerson in the Washington Post (11 December 2009); Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal (3 December 2009); George Will in the Washington Post (6 December 2009); “Breakpoint” (2 December 2009); James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, pp. 257-259.

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