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ORNL chief: 'Climategate' a distraction: Strong science will survive scrutiny, Mason says
OAK RIDGE, Dec 09, 2009 (The Knoxville News-Sentinel - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason said the factual basis on anthropogenic climate change does not depend on any particular group or group of reports, and he said the latest controversy -- which is being called "Climategate" -- does not alter the validity of that scientific consensus.
He called the current situation "unfortunate" and "a tremendous distraction from the real issues."
The recent release of thousands of e-mail messages, hacked from the computer servers at a British university, has put private discussions among climate scientists up for public perusal via the Internet and raised the temperature of already hot debate over global climate change and its causes.
Critics have used excerpts from the e-mails -- some of which date to 1996 -- to suggest scientists are manipulating data to gain their preferred outcome and working behind the scenes to discredit the skeptics.
"I haven't read all the e-mails, but just sort of read through some of them more or less at random to be able to form my own opinion," Mason said. "As far as I can see, the vast majority of it is what looks like the normal type of scientific dialogue -- a certain amount of jousting, a certain amount of professional jealousy. Science is a human endeavor. It's all those things, as you would expect."
Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and one of the contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that shared a 2007 Nobel Prize with Al Gore, last week said he was surprised by what he considered to be inappropriate comments in some of the e-mail reports stolen from servers at the University of East Anglia's climate research unit.
"What I would say to any public audience is that these quotes, if they're not taken out of context, are embarrassing not only to these scientists, who are good people, but everybody who does climate science. Our job is to find out what the facts are and to report the facts and not to package them in a way to support some particular point of view. ... You don't talk about shaping how the science is or fudge the results or give journals a hard time because they're publishing things that are skeptical," Wilbanks said.
Mason said there's a "human element" involved. He said most people have probably had the unnerving experience in which they've sent a personal reply to someone and inadvertently hit "reply all" and -- almost immediately -- went "Whoops!"
Wilbanks said people involved in the so-called Climategate are just a small fraction of the scientific community studying climate, and data supporting the science come from many sources. There's no reason to fudge any facts, he said.
"The facts of climate change are strong enough that we don't have to do that. People in Alaska know that the climate is warming. The Navy knows that the polar sea ice is thinning. Those things are not in dispute," he said.
Mason said the scientific community has "pretty robust mechanisms" for verifying and validating scientific results over time, and a consensus is not developed through any one result or group of results, he said.
As for the reported hacking of servers at East Anglia, Mason said, "Having been the victims of hackers ourselves, I have some sympathy on that account."
The ORNL director was referring to a 2007 cyber attack in which hackers gained access to an Oak Ridge database with the stored personal information of thousands of people who visited the lab over a period of years. ORNL sent letters to 12,000 potential victims, although there apparently has been no evidence that the stolen information has been used maliciously.
Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.
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