The Guardian attempts to inflame climate change denial

The Guardian has been getting on my nerves for quite a while now, what with its ever-escalating attempts to become the most pretentious newspaper in Britain, but over the last couple of days it has really, really done my head in. Both today and yesterday its main headlines have concerned the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a story that came to the fore just before the meeting at Copenhagen and that really doesn't need to be dragged up again. Blasting it over the front pages doesn't achieve anything other than to give fuel to the sceptics who pounce on any trace of scientific fallibility and proclaim it as proof that the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change is a lie propagated in order to provide evil scientists with jobs and money.

A tiny handful of scientists seem to have behaved inappropriately, and a tiny amount of dodgy data seems to have crept into the IPCC’s report, but none of these 'new revelations', as the Guardian calls them, have any effect whatsoever on the bigger picture. A few choice quotations from over 2000 e-mails sent across a period of more than a decade are hardly cast iron evidence of a conspiracy. And some of these 'damning' quotes are nothing of the sort. For example, Prof Michael Mann apparently suggested that his colleagues should stop submitting papers to the journal Climate Research following its publication of an article that disagreed with his own research. This could suggest that he was stifling alternative views, or, with equal validity, could suggest that the journal’s standards were slipping and that it had begun to publish junk which undermined the field of climatology as a whole. Without context, and without knowledge of the research involved, we simply don't know which is true. This didn't stop the sub editors (most likely people from an arts background with zero knowledge of science) from emblazoning the page with the headline 'How scientists kept sceptics out of print'.

Journalists always like a bit of conflict and are well known to create it where none exists in order to manufacture a good story. In a piece in today's Guardian, however, they seem to be implying that no conflict should exist between scientists! Disagreement over the famous 'hockey stick' graph showing temperature rise over the past thousand years is portrayed again as evidence of the suppression of different views, whereas in reality it is just normal scientific discourse. A major way in which knowledge progresses is by scientists talking to each other, arguing with each other, picking holes in each other's ideas until they come to an agreement. At the end of the conversation, hopefully they will have a better theory to explain what's going on than they did at the beginning. Again, where's the conspiracy?

I might have more time for these kind of stories if everyone was held to the same kind of standards as these climate scientists are. Especially journalists, who let’s face it aren't exactly renowned for their accuracy and agenda-free reporting. I should imagine that if we looked at anyone's e-mails across a long period of time we would find instances where they'd said something that sounded incriminating, made an error, or called a person a rude name. If these journalists were being bombarded with Freedom of Information requests from non-experts whose sole intent was to discredit them and their work, I should imagine they might not respond in a particularly friendly or speedy fashion. Why then should scientists, who are human beings too, be expected to behave angelically?

I know that there are some scientists who have ulterior motives, I know that a lot of the time climate doomsayers go completely over the top, and I know that there are still a lot of unanswered questions. I've been a student at three different universities, so I know how academics can sometimes be egotistical and overly-competitive. But the scientific method is such that the truth will win out, and to the best of our knowledge the truth is that anthropogenic climate change is real. And we don't need shoddy journalism trying to hide that fact.