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Ethics And Climate Science.

My comment on ethics in climate science, as a comment posted at Judith Curry’s excellent Climate Etc blog.

I’m late to the discussion, but here is my opinion on all this:

Scientists are typically passionate about their work. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, I support that passion. They have a desire to fight for their work and should do so – tooth and nail, if need be.

Where it gets problematic is when a group of like minded scientists, who are all very passionate about their work, in essence collude and construct a process that locks out any reasonable challenge from occurring within the system they hold up as the main confirmation of work in their field, in this case, the IPCC. Then there is the blatant interference behind the scenes with the peer review process. They themselves may not even see any of this as problematic., as it is done for “the cause”. They know they are right.

The problem with “knowing you are right”, is that that often leads you blindly down paths you normally wouldn’t go. Think of all the people who have been caught doing questionable, if not illegal things, and it was justified because they thought that they were right in their actions. Ken Lay emphatically swore to his innocence up till the day he died because he “knew he was right”, that people lost money in Enron because of bad investment and dumb luck, and not anything he actually did or didn’t do. And then examine how that gets amplified when it is adopted by a group of individuals. The whole financial system is (and will always be) rife with this blindness.

Then there is the Penn State fiasco. McQueary thought he doing the right thing to go to father and Paterno instead of the police because he thought it was the right thing to do in the larger frame of mind of protecting the reputation of the University. The intense passion that drove so many involved to protect the University at all cost clouded their better judgement. I can’t say for sure, but I am willing to bet that somewhere along the line, someone involved with the cover up though something like “man, I think we’d better get the police involved in this horrible thing”, but turned that thought aside because there were already too many “good” people involve who might get into trouble for ignoring the 1998 incident. And then the process of information diversion was locked into place…. Until the dam burst and the walls came crashing down.

Now, certainly, any obfuscation that is occurring within the climate science community does not in any way equal the grotesque nature of the Penn State fiasco. However, the pattern of collusion is clear and must be face within the climate science community if they wish to earn back the trust of the majority of the general public.