Sheila Jasanoff in 'science': Testing Time for Climate Science

Sheila Jassanoff, from Harvard University, discusses in the journal 'science' the issues of  integrity and accountability of contemporaryclimate sciences.

Her analysis begins with "... a British parliamentary committee exonerated Philip D. Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, of personal wrongdoing in his conduct and management of research. Climate science fared less well. The Science and Technology Committee concluded in its report that the focus on a single individual had been misplaced: 'we consider that Professor Jones's actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community'. Those practices included routine refusals to share raw data and computer codes. The committee judged that this had to change and that all future raw data and methodological work should be publicly disclosed.", and ends with "... it will not be enough for climate scientists to be still more scrupulous and transparent toward their peers. Adding more new forms of expertise may increase the credibility of the field, but it will not fully address the third component of accountability, which involves relations between science and its publics. ... However, the IPCC has demonstrated that it can learn and change in its methods of representing science to scientists. That ingenuity should now be directed toward building relationships of trust and respect with the global citizens whose future climate science has undertaken to predict and reshape." Interestingly, R. K. Merton is mentioned; it seems that a certain recognition of "old" standards (e.g. "organized skepticism") seem to rebuild in the public attention.


There is one issue, however, with has not been addressed, namely which role of the specific journal 'science' is playing.  An example is the rejection of 'science' to allow for a open discussion of validity of the broad conclusions drawn in the well-known Oreskes study (science 306, 2004), according to which a practically complete acceptance of the AGW hypothesis would be found in the publications of climate scientists. Similarly, a series of critical comments documenting the flawed concept published in 2007 in 'science', according to which sea level rise could be predicted linearly from temperature rise, was prematurely halted by the editors.