According to Joseph Bast, the University of Oxford should be ‘ashamed’ for associating itself with ‘a bungling thief and scientific fraud’. Bast is President of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute; the man accused is Dr Peter Gleick, a renowned expert on water resources and climate change. Gleick posed as a Heartland board member to solicit evidence for claims that the Institute was preparing to ‘muddy the waters’ on climate science.
Gleick’s frustration with the anti-climate lobby is understandable. Particularly in the US, climatologists face an uphill struggle to persuade an apathetic public. But, the way Gleick gathered his ‘evidence’ has cast doubts on its authenticity: he has even been accused of forging one of the documents he obtained. Gleick’s actions were at best naïve, at worst stupid and illegal. Worse still, he contaminated the debate he was trying to advance. His actions have given what Heartland calls ‘limate realists’ real ammunition, and they have seized upon it. In doing so, a purely scientific debate has been dragged out of science and into politics, a move especially damaging because it is gleefully trumpeted by climate sceptics. The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker triumphantly gloated ‘supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing.’ What do we expect the average reader to infer? That climate scientists are desperate, misbegotten swindlers. Gleick is grievously at fault for damaging the cause for, and debate over, climate science. He has destroyed the integrity of thousands of scientists at a stroke, and that is a heinous mistake to make.
However, there is an important second point. There is no evidence Gleick is a ‘scientific fraud’. Despite what Heartland might say, his scientific – and I stress the scientific – views are in good company. Just ask the Royal Society, the foremost organisation of British scientists. They know there’s no debate on the fundamentals of climate change. Gleick’s private decisions may have been stupid, but that does not mean his professional work – peer-reviewed and examined by the rest of the scientific community – is also in doubt.
Bast claimed that ‘Linus Pauling and Edwin Hubble must be spinning in their graves’, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps, instead, they’d recognise a man who has acted foolishly, but whose scientific work is part of the effort to understand the changes in our world like never before. Oxford is the university of Edmund Halley, one of the first scientists to study the world’s atmosphere. I’m sure that, like Hubble and Pauling, he’d know good science when he saw it.
So, let Gleick come to Oxford. Let him speak to students as the eminent scientist he remains. Perhaps at the same time he can give a brief lesson in the right and wrong ways of meeting your opponents.
