Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [4]
On 20 November 2009, the world woke up to the ‘climategate’ scandal. Activists sceptical of scientists’ claims about climate change had hacked into the email system of the University of East Anglia. They managed to download a set of communications which, the activists claimed, showed that scientists had manipulated climate data to strengthen the case for global warming.
The ensuing investigation eventually cleared the scientists involved of any scientific misdemeanours, but there were serious official misgivings about some of the scientists’ attitudes and obstructiveness towards those trying to get hold of their data. And the damage, it seemed, was done. In February 2010, a poll commissioned by the BBC showed that the number of adults who did not think global warming was happening had increased by 10 per cent since the previous November. This was ‘very disappointing’, Bob Watson, the UK’s chief environmental scientist, told BBC News. ‘Trust has been damaged,’ German climate scientist Hans von Storch told the Guardian in July 2010. ‘People now find it conceivable that scientists cheat and manipulate.’
The thing is, this doesn’t actually explain the BBC poll results. Close inspection reveals that most people who had changed their views as a direct result of climategate had become more convinced of global warming, not less.
The downturn in public acceptance of climate change was most likely a consequence of a harsh British winter. A study carried out in March by Stanford University researchers revealed that any impact of climategate on public opinion had already disappeared. This was confirmed in June, when polls on both sides of the Atlantic showed that February’s increase in climate scepticism had died away.
The only tangible outcome of climategate was positive. People who were unsure about whether to trust scientists got a glimpse of scientists being human – and thought that was OK. In fact it was more than OK, as the net allegiance change in the BBC poll shows. Contrary to everything scientists might have feared, exposing their irrationality, their humanity, even their craftiness and hot tempers, makes the public more receptive to the revelations of science, not less. People can not only take the truth about science, they actually prefer it.
It seems that scientists may have perpetrated one of the most misguided cover-ups in history. The trouble is, it will be painful to undo because it has served some scientists rather well.
The educated Western mind venerates science to the point of mysticism: its proponents are the new high priests. And scientists do little to discourage that reverence. In his 1951 book The Common Sense of Science, Bronowski went so far as to admit that scientists actively welcome it. Scientists ‘have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god,’ he wrote. A famous example of this comes at the end of Hawking’s extraordinary book, A Brief History of Time. He talks about the revelations we are seeking from science. Get to where we want to go, he says, and we will ‘know the mind of God’.
The scientists with Hawking in the Davis auditorium are closer to knowing the mind of God than most. The meeting was convened to discuss the implications of a new set of results from one of NASA’s orbiting telescopes: the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. WMAP is a satellite equipped with state-of-theart instrumentation and backed up by thousands of researchers who use the world’s biggest computers to dissect its data. But its function can be summed up pretty simply: it is a pair of cosmic bat ears.
Just as bats listen for echoes to tell them