Everybody does it

RP Jnr links to a review of the Climategate story by Der Speigel and has a fascinating discussion with his readers in the comments thread below.

The point at issue is Mike's Nature Trick and the question of whether it amounts to scientific fraud. Der Spiegel describe the trick as follows:

But what appeared at first glance to be fraud ["hide the decline"] was actually merely a face-saving fudge: Tree-ring data indicates no global warming since the mid-20th century, and therefore contradicts the temperature measurements. The clearly erroneous tree data was thus corrected by the so-called "trick" with the temperature graphs.

Many of Roger's readers take issue with the description of the divergent data as "erroneous" and I tend to agree with them here. The data has been processed in the same way in the twentieth century as in earlier periods, so it is not erroneous, but anomalous. The reason for the divergence is unknown and the divergence therefore needs to be disclosed and discussed since it potentially undermines all tree-ring based temperature reconstructions.

Roger argues that the Nature trick amounts to a fudge but not fraud. I'm struggling with this slightly. My dictionary defines a fudge as "a patch, trick, cheat" and fraud as "deceit, trick" so I'm not entirely convinced that there is any difference between "fudge" and "fraud" in terms of academic conduct (I'm ignoring the criminal meaning of of fraud here).

Everyone seems to agree that what was done was to hide uncertainty from the reader, but when a reader tells him that hiding uncertainty is fraud, Roger disagrees

I hear what you are saying, however, in the world of academia, this is just not the case. If it were, most work across most field would be guilty of such charges ;-)

I'm not sure about the smiley here. But when you have such enormous policy questions to answer, I remain entirely unconvinced that an argument of "all academics are dishonest" is going to carry the day.

"Everybody does it" is not grounds for exonerating scientists who hide unfortunate facts from policymakers and the public any more than it was grounds for exonerating the MPs who were caught abusing their expenses claims.

And one other thing. Remember the Parliamentary hearings about Climategate? The select committee criticised Jones et al for withholding data and generally flouting the Freedom of Information laws, but exonerated Jones on the grounds that everybody else in the field behaved in the same way. So this kind of argument seems worrying prevalent in the climate debate.

If Roger is right and all scientists engage in this kind of deception and if it is also true that it is accepted that policymakers accept that "everybody does it" is a valid excuse, what does that tell us about the integrity of the policies that are being thrust upon us?

Comments

[FrankS]

Must have hit a nerve here - this entry ( along with one of Dellingpoles blogs) has made it onto the Guardian's "Campaign against Climate Change aggregator" email (www.campaigncc.org)

Usually the entries never stray far from The Guardian or The Mail