7:37 p.m. | Updated |
Here’s a short followup on the sad saga of Peter Gleick, the water and climate analyst who admitted using a false identity to obtain files that provided a detailed picture of the finances and plans of the anti-regulatory Heartland Institute.
First, I will not retract the post I wrote on Gleick’s confession, as demanded by climate campaigner Joe Romm in a piece yesterday on Heartland, Gleick and me. You can read his long screed or simply read this distillation from a post by David Appell on Quark Soup:
They’re worse (meaning Heartland) ~1500 words
Gleick was wrong: 27 words
Journalist scum! ~1000 words
I’ve known Gleick as a source and acquaintance since I first quoted him in 1988, which made it very hard to write the piece on Monday. I will acknowledge that certain phrases, written in haste, were overstated. Gleick’s reputation and credibility are seriously damaged, not necessarily in ruins or destroyed.
Nonetheless, the real-world ramifications of his actions are already playing out in his withdrawal from the board of the National Center for Science Education and his withdrawal last week from the chairmanship of the the American Geophysical Union task force on scientific ethics. In a statement yesterday, the organization’s president, Michael McPhaden, said this:
AGU is disappointed that Dr. Gleick acted in a way that is inconsistent with our organization’s values. AGU expects its members to adhere to the highest standards of scientific integrity in their research and in their interactions with colleagues and the public. Among the core values articulated in AGU’s Strategic Plan are ‘excellence and integrity in everything we do.’ The vast majority of scientists share and live by these values.
He’s also lost his commentator slot on the City Brights blog page of the San Francisco Chronicle website, SFGate.com.
Bryan Walsh of Time Magazine, in a newly posted article, notes that Gleick, in his stance as chairman of that task force, co-authored a piece for Eos, the geophysical union’s informal journal, on ethics late last year:
Gleick and his co-author Randy Townsend of the AGU wrote that advancing scientific work to create a sustainable future would only be possible if scientists had the trust of the public and policymakers. And that trust, they added, “is earned by maintaining the highest standards of scientific integrity in all that we do.”
Strong words, and true ones too, but Gleick himself has failed to live up to them — and his actions have hurt not just his own professional reputation but the cause of climate science as well.
Finally, Gavin A. Schmidt, the NASA climate scientist who leads the RealClimate blog, echoed these (and my) views in a response to a RealClimate comment on the Heartland saga by one of his readers:
Gleick’s actions were completely irresponsible and while the information uncovered was interesting (if unsurprising), it in no way justified his actions. There is an integrity required to do science (and talk about it credibly), and he has unfortunately failed this test. The public discussion on this issue will be much the poorer for this – both directly because this event is (yet) another reason not to have a serious discussion, but also indirectly because his voice as an advocate of science, once powerful, has now been diminished
There’s much more to read if you want to get beyond the headlines and attack lines and dig in on deeper issues here.
[7:37 p.m. | Updated | I’ve been remiss in not pointing out the important reporting of Megan McArdle of The Atlantic on the origins of the Heartland files and some of Gleick’s statements. Her latest piece is a must-read that asks more probing questions and clarifies what is, and is not, responsible investigative journalism.]
The varied ethical stances on the incident were laid out nicely by Suzanne Golenberg in The Guardian yesterday.
The climate scientist Simon Donner, who joined Gleick in signing a recent letter to The Wall Street Journal rebutting an op-ed article by other scientists questioning the seriousness of global warming, weighed in on the downside of lowering ethical thresholds in the name of a worthy mission:
[I]f climate discourse is a street fight, then we need to do more than fight back with the same dirty tactics. If you want to win a fight, you need to be able to take a punch.
This is just a snippet from a thoughtful, must-read piece, so please click and look. (Incidentally, The Journal has published a response from the 16 authors of the original op-ed to their critics. It’s well worth reading the full exchange; all three pieces are at the preceding link.)
I’ll add more thoughts and context here as time allows. I encourage those planning to comment to tone things down. I was away when the first flood of reactions came in on the Monday night post and so could not personally moderate or respond to the first 200 or so comments.
I’ve got to add a brief addendum on Joe Romm.
It was amusing, in a sad sort of way, to see Romm zero in on my comment on NPR about mistakes in 2009, as if that showed how little I can be trusted to convey the seriousness of climate science.
Actually the biggest mistake in my reporting that year (perhaps one of my biggest ever) was in an overstated opening section to a front-page article on the early years of industry’s battle to raise climate doubt – the same fight that goes on today.
Romm trumpeted it as a “must-read story,” but it turned out I had missed a small, but vital element in fact checking that resulted in a big correction and sustained trumpeting by professional greenhouse doubt sowers. If I had avoided the error, the story still would have presented powerful evidence that a major industry group’s own science advisers were saying the basics of greenhouse-driven warming were well established. But the error greatly distracted from the rest of the piece.
Romm’s claim that my news story on a recent lack of warming was wrong doesn’t acknowledge the sequence of scientific papers since that time pointing to a pause or hiatus in the global warming trend, most notably in the 2010 Science paper by Susan Solomon and others that said:
Here we use a combination of data and models to show that stratospheric water vapor very likely made substantial contributions to the flattening of the global warming trend since about 2000.
And this year, there’s the paper by Gerald Meehl et al.:
There have been decades, such as 2000–2009, when the observed globally averaged surface-temperature time series shows little increase or even a slightly negative trend (a hiatus period).
I’m not proud of any errors, but I do make them. It’s enormously creditable that Peter Gleick has owned up to his terrible error in judgment.
The only people I see out there in the climate fight who – as far as I can tell — never admit to an error are people with agendas from which they can never stray. They’re perfect.