The CRU hack - so what?

Background here.

So "the CRU hack" might have been the work of a whistleblower, not a hacker. So what? Was there any wrongdoing to blow the whistle on?

You can find lots of discussion on this issue all over the Internet. (Here's one place to start. Here's another.) I don't see any evidence of wrongdoing in the sense of outright fabrication of data. But there is plenty of reason to wonder if there is wrongdoing in the sense of groupthink and cherry-picking of data (maybe even suppressing data) to support a particular point of view.

As just one example, this 2008 e-mail exchange between Dr. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, and Dr. Michael Mann about deleting e-mails, if true, is troubling:

1212063122

[The reference to "AR4" means the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC, released in 2007. The reference to "CA" means the Climate Audit blog.] Any request to delete e-mails on a particular subject, especially at a time when the organization is responding to FOIA requests, is troubling. (Note that the subject of the e-mail is "IPCC & FOI.")

Whether or not any of this is illegal, I leave to others. But I think a strong case can be made that it is bad science. That's the root of the controversy: is the science of climate change good science or bad science? What is science, anyway?

It is clear that the scientists at CRU and RealClimate are human, with egos and emotions. They aren't always nice. Consider this quote from the first post on RealClimate in response to this incident:

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him.

True enough. But it's interesting that they would mention Feynman, an authority on scientific integrity. That's what this is about at bottom. See especially Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement speech titled "Cargo Cult Science." Feynman said that scientific integrity requires

utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards....If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.

Feynman wasn't talking about deliberate attempts to fool others. He was talking about the very human tendency to fool oneself: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

Do the e-mails in "the CRU hack" reveal "a kind of leaning over backwards" to consider other points of view? No, just the opposite. If true, they reveal a concerted effort to stamp out other points of view. This is bad science. What "the CRU hack" makes us wonder is this: are the establishment scientists involved in climate change fooling themselves?

Feynman is dead, so we can't ask him what he thinks about the state of climate science. But a one-time colleague, Freeman Dyson, with views similar to Feynman's about scientific integrity, has lately turned his formidable intellect to climate science. His view? "Lousy science."

UPDATE 12/03/09: Today's Wall Street Journal has a letter to the editor with most of the above Feynman quotes. It's nice to know that Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" speech has not been forgotten.