Truth or Consequences

December 18^th saw the publication of two articles, Climate E-mails Don't Alter the Evidence, by Michael Mann in the Washington Post, and How to Manufacture Climate Consensus, by Patrick Michaels in the Wall Street Journal. Both of these articles discuss the implications of the hacked/stolen emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit commonly referred to as Climategate.

Mr. Mann contends that, although he doesn't condone many of the actions described in the emails, the emails themselves do not change the evidence of anthropogenic global warming. He further argues that the emails themselves are being "mined" and that excerpts are being taken out of context, and distorted.

Mr. Michaels, on the other hand, makes a case that a more serious problem is evidenced in the East Anglia emails, that of the suppression of contrary viewpoints. It should be pointed out that Michaels, himself, is not a skeptic of anthropogenic global warming, but that he has written articles that question it's magnitude. For this, he says, he has found it increasingly difficult to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

The International Panel on Climate Change, as well as the United States Environmental Protection Agency, has used a compendium of peer-reviewed articles as a basis for its findings on global warming. If this data is compromised, the entire basis of their decisions is undermined.

The basis of Science is the search for Truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel, or how it may undermine some of our core beliefs. The reason that scientific discovery has advanced at such a rapid pace over the past several centuries is that it has been based on the free interchange of ideas, which are continually submitted to rigorous examination and scrutiny. Any undermining of this free interchange of ideas, is no different than the Church censoring Galileo for having the temerity to suggest that the Earth travels around the Sun, rather than vice-versa.