What Mad Pursuit

Over at the New Atlantis site, Ivan Kenneally gives a brief and damning summary of the contents of emails hacked from University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU).  He writes,

“Perhaps the most damning e-mails concern CRU deputy director Keith Briffa’s analysis of the diameter of tree rings in Yamal, Siberia. That research is a major evidentiary pillar in support of twentieth-century global warming and it helped resurrect Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’ graph of global warming. The scientist largely responsible for challenging Mann’s work, Steve McIntyre, turned his attention to Briffa’s resurrection of it and accused him of cherry-picking samples that would confirm his politically desirable hypothesis.

“The response to McIntyre’s work revealed in the CRU e-mails shows a breathtaking pattern of ideological rigidity and academic fraudulence that is simultaneously egregious and casually self-satisfied. First, it becomes clear that the global warming crowd, in particular Mann and Osborn, are quick to dismiss McIntyre’s work as ‘not legitimate science’ even before reviewing his studies. Their initial reflex is not to scrutinize McIntyre’s analysis or to reconsider their own entrenched positions but rather to respond with a kind of angry, territorial protectiveness. Then they collectively identify someone who could, in fact, ‘shed light on McIntyre’s criticisms of Yamal’ but choose not to contact him because he ‘can be rather a loose cannon.’ Another scientist who might have helped clarify the Yamal situation is dismissed by Mann for being ‘not as predictable as we’d like.’ Unquestioning loyalty to a political platform is understood to be the precondition of scientific authenticity.

“Even worse, in response to the charge that Briffa’s work is difficult to verify because he withholds key data from the published study, Tom Wigley actually issues a justification of the practice: ‘And the issue of withholding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you [Phil Jones] and Keith [Briffa] (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons — but many good scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that withholding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.’  Wigley provides no discussion at all regarding what would count as an appropriate reason for concealing data, or what benefit this could bring to the scientific community at large. One is left to wonder if the justification for hiding information is political rather than scientific. Mann seems unconcerned that any of these issues will resonate with a friendly media: ‘Fortunately,’ he wrote to a New York Times reporter, ‘the prestige press doesn’t fall for this sort of stuff, right?’”

Al Gore’s bad day.