(Climate) science as religion

A staggering thought about the Climategate scandal:

Professor Mike Hulme, a fellow researcher of Jones at the University of East Anglia and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, said: "The attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organisation within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science."

There could, however, be another reason why the unit rejected requests to see its data.

This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: "Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites ... We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data."

If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world's understanding of climate change is based can never be revisited or checked. Pielke said: "Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, 'Trust us'."

Where does this leave the climate debate? While the overwhelming belief of scientists is that the world is getting warmer and that humanity is responsible, sceptical voices are increasing.

Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, announced last week the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to "bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant".

Lawson said: "Climate change is not being properly debated because all the political parties are on the same side, and there is an intolerance towards anybody who wants to debate it. It has turned climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion."

This brings to mind journalist Brian Appleyard's complaint about P.Z. Myers and scientists like him who police the scientific discussion like the Saudi religious police. Excerpt:

Treating science as an ideology, an occasion for polemic and abuse, and anathematising those who dissent is profoundly unscientific. It is an attitude that will, in the end, damage not just science itself but science as a public institution. Science is, as Thomas Nagel put it, a 'view from nowhere', it is a method, not a posture towards the world. It assumes - and, indeed, attains - the possibility of a superhuman perspective. As such, it is a profoundly admirable and magnificent achievement of the human intellect. But it is only one such achievement. When science aspires to be anything else -- ideology, for example -- it is prone to delusion, fantasy and intolerance.

That is where we now are, a dangerous place where people set up web sites that abandon mere explanation and promote science as an ideology, as, in effect, an opinion held with such ferocity that all dissent must be crushed. This phase, I hope, will pass. But I am beginning to have my doubts.

I have always thought one great advantage science has as a way of knowing is that it is free from predetermined dogmas, and therefore at liberty to go wherever the facts take the investigation. But science is not carried out by machines, but by humans, who are never free from their own dogmas and limitations. It is, in fact, a great disadvantage if scientists come to think of themselves as the only open-minded, truly freethinking people in the room. They forget to check themselves. I am not able to say how serious the climate e-mail scandal is, and to what extent it should affect what we muggles think about climate change. But I feel certain that the attempt by those top climate scientists to lie and shade the truth to fit their own ideology, even if their judgment about climate change is correct, will have done more damage to the cause of science and scientific truth than they can possibly imagine.

I understand why politicians and activists lie for their causes. I don't approve of it, but I understand it. I even understand why religious people lie for their causes, though it mystifies me why they don't fear the judgment of the God in whom they profess to believe. But I really don't understand why scientists think deception in reporting empirical data is ever a good idea, not even in an ends justify the means way. What end could possibly justify lying about the data?

"Live not by lies." -- Solzhenitsyn

(H/T: Sullivan)