Science behind closed doors 围城里的科学

Science behind closed doors

围城里的科学

Two new reports say the science of climate change is fine, but that some scientists and the institutions they work in need to change their attitudes

最新的两份报告表明气候学界的学术气氛仍然是良好的，但是某些科学家以及他们所工作的机构必须改变对待公众的态度。

Jul 8th 2010

 


THE winter of 2009 was a rough time for climate science. In November, in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference, over 1,000 private e-mails from and to researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a part of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Britain, appeared on the internet, presumably after being stolen. At the same time a controversy was bubbling up in India over a claim in the 2007 assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the Himalayas could lose all their glaciers in 25 years, which was wrong. These events seemed to provide evidence of embarrassing incompetence, at the very least.

2009年冬季对气候学界来说是段难熬的日子。当年11月份，正当哥本哈根气候峰会即将召开之际，英国东安格利亚大学（University of East Anglia）气候研究部门（CRU）的科学家之间超过1000封私人邮件被盗窃泄露到互联网上。与此同时，有关联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会在2007递交的一份评估报告中提出的喜马拉雅山脉的冰川将于25年之内全部消失的错误结论的争议也开始在印度浮现出来。不管怎么说，这些事件反映出了气候学界令人尴尬的无能。

Explanations were demanded and committees were formed to deliver them. This week two of those committees reported. For the CRU and what became known as “climategate”, an independent panel was created by UEA and chaired by Muir Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow. The Dutch environmental-assessment agency was asked to look for other errors in the regional analyses of the IPCC’s report. Both the reports conclude that the science of climate is sound and that the professional characters of the scientists involved are unimpeached. But they raise important issues about how to do science in such an argumentative area and under new levels of scrutiny, especially from a largely hostile and sometimes expert blogosphere.

专门的组委会被组建起来以调查真相，本周其中的两家组委会做出了相关的报告。一个由东安格利亚大学组织并由格拉斯哥大学（University of Glasgow）前任副校长Muir Russell主持的独立委员会（下文称罗素委员会）被组建起来调查该气候研究部门事件--此事后来被人们称为“气候门”。荷兰的环境评估部门被指定调查联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会的报告中有关区域气候分析的其他纰误。来自双方的报告都得出结论说气候学界的学术气氛是科学健全的，被牵连的科学家的职业操守也是无可厚非的。但这些事件也让人们意识到一些重要的问题，就是在一个如此具有争议性的领域，尤其是面对来自基本上都是心怀敌意并具有一定专业水准的大众博客圈的仔细审查，科学家应该怎样做科学研究。

The Dutch agency found a few errors in the relevant chapters of the IPCC’s report, though none amounted to much. It also raised questions about concentrating on bad or worst-case possibilities rather than a range of outcomes. The agency did not say this was a bad thing—policymakers need to have the most critical information flagged up—but it thinks it would be better to explain more clearly what is going on.

荷兰的环境部门在联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会的报告中相关章节找到了一些纰误，但是都无关大碍。这也同样引起了另外一个问题，我们是应该关注那些可能出现的最糟糕的情况还是一系列可能的结果？调查部门没有说宣传最糟糕的可能性有什么不对，因为决策者需要科学家向他们强调最关键的信息，但是如果能够向大众解释清楚到底是怎么回事就最好了。

Martin Parry, who in 2007 was co-chair of the relevant IPCC working group, says there was not a conscious decision to highlight negative effects, but to highlight important ones, as measured by such things as scale and irreversibility. The important effects are negative ones: this is why people are worried about climate change. A tendency for the IPCC process to produce outputs more worrying, at the margins, than its inputs does not necessarily show bias. It may reflect accurate expert assessment. But the risk that it is a sort of self-reinforcing groupthink merits attention.

2007年联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会相关工作小组的联合主席Martin Parry说，科学家们潜意识中并没有去强调气候变化的负面影响，而是去强调以影响的广度和可逆性来衡量最重要的结果。而其实最重要的是前者，这也是公众关心气候变化的原因。联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会的报告倾向于得出比实际情况更加严重的结论并不一定意味着其报告与实际情况存在偏差。它也同样可能反应正确的评估结果。不过当然，这些结论是否仅仅是由一群人互相危言耸听造成的也同样值得人们关注。

Open to criticism

欢迎批评

A form of groupthink certainly seems to have been at work in the climategate e-mails. The Russell committee was most exercised by a lack of openness at the CRU, in part explained, but not excused, by a sort of a siege mentality. The committee found that the scientists committed nothing close to fraud. It showed that the data needed to reconstruct CRU’s temperature records were widely available. Informed by a warts-and-all account of peer review from Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, a medical journal, the committee took the researchers’ harsh behaviour towards critics and leniency towards allies not as unduly partial or aggressive, but as part of the “rough and tumble of interaction in an area of science that has become heavily contested.” As an eminent historian of science put it to a naive scientist when the story first broke, “Everything you believe to be true once looked like this.”

在“气候门”邮件中显然存在着一种集体性思维。罗素委员会在东安格利亚大学气候研究部门的调查本身就缺乏透明度，这部分可以从某种受困心态来解释，但绝不能以此为借口。委员会的调查表明相关科学家没有任何学术造假的迹象，重建该部门的气温记录所需的原始数据也随处可得。受医学杂志《柳叶刀》（The Lancet）主编Richard Horton关于同行评审瑕瑜共存的解释所启发，委员会没有将相关研究人员对批评者的刻薄行为和对支持者的过分宽容视为是不当的偏见或挑衅，而是视为在一个被广泛质疑的科学领域中研究人员与公众之间艰难而匮乏的沟通的部分体现。就像一位著名的科学史学家在事件刚发生时将之归咎于科学家天真的想法时所说的那样，“你现在所信以为真的一切科学理论都曾有过这么一段不为大众接受的阶段。”

But the committee did criticise the researchers for an unwillingness to pass on data to their critics, for failing to specify which weather stations they were using, for keeping quiet IPCC discussions that should have been public, and so on. This flowed through into “clear incitement” to delete files rather than have them surrendered under Britain’s freedom-of-information act. The committee found UEA’s procedures on freedom of information poor.

同时委员会也确实批评了相关研究人员的一些不当行为，比如不情愿将数据交给批评者，没有注明他们的数据来源是哪座气象站，以及在本该公开的联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会的讨论中保持神秘等。当他们选择删除对己不利的文件而不是在英国信息公开法案的要求下交出这些数据的时候，整个事件演变成为对大众神经的一次公然的刺激。委员会发现东安格利亚大学信息公开的措施相当不力。

Rather remarkably, neither the Russell committee or the university has asked Phil Jones, who ran the CRU, whether he actually deleted e-mails with the intention of foiling subsequent requests under the act. The university says it takes very seriously the need to improve its openness. At the same time it has appointed Dr Jones to a new position as director of research at the CRU—“definitely not a demotion”—while abolishing the role of director and integrating the unit more fully into its school of environmental sciences.

异乎寻常的是，罗素委员会和东安格利亚大学都没有质问该部门主管Phil Jones删除这些邮件的目的是否是为了阻止之后在信息公开法案要求下调阅资料的请求。东安格利亚大学说该校在信息公开的要求上非常认真，撤销了气候研究部门主任一职并将促使该部门与环境科学学术界接轨，然而与此同时却以该校气候研究部门研究主任的新职务聘用Phil Jones博士--这当然不是降职了。

In doing this UEA accepts that Dr Jones’s role in one of the most famous aspects of climategate—his “hide the decline” e-mail—was “misleading”, as the Russell report puts it, without deliberately intending to be so. The growth of some trees, as recorded in their rings, tracks temperature from the 19th century to the 1960s, but then ceases to do so: the two records diverge. In a graph prepared for the World Meteorological Organisation in 1999, Dr Jones cut off the divergent part of one set of tree-ring data and spliced on data from thermometers. The scientific literature contained full discussions about the problems of divergence and various ways of dealing with them, but Dr Jones’s chart had no readily accessible explanations or caveats.

东安格利亚大学的做法表明它接受了罗素委员会报告中关于Jones博士在此次“气候门”中所扮演之角色的说法，Jones博士掩藏气候变冷证据确实具有误导性，但是没有误导大众的主观意愿。记录在年轮上的树木生长情况反映了从19世纪到20世纪60年代的气候信息，但是随后它们就不再记录了：因为两种结果背道而驰。在1999年为世界气候组织所准备的图表中，Jones博士裁掉了树木年轮数据上跟气候变暖所矛盾的部分并粘贴上从温度计测量而来的数据。科学文献中有关于此背离问题的完整讨论并且有多种处理方法，但是Jones博士的图表上没有任何显见的解释或注释。

The Russell report is thorough, but it will not satisfy all the critics. Nor does it, in some ways, fulfil its remit. One of the enduring mysteries of climategate is who chose the e-mails released onto the internet and why they did so. These e-mails represented just 0.3% of the material on the university’s backup server, from which they were taken. This larger content has still not really been explored.

罗素委员会的报告虽然很详尽，但也仍然不能使反对者满意。在某种程度上它同样也没有完成它的职责。关于气候门一个持久的疑问是谁筛选了被泄漏到互联网上的电子邮件以及它们为什么要这么做。这些邮件仅仅是其所在的该校备份服务器上所有资料的0.3%。服务器上更多的内容还没有被调查过。

And then there is the science. An earlier report on climategate from the House of Commons assumed that a subsequent probe by a panel under Lord Oxburgh, a former academic and chairman of Shell, would deal with the science. The Oxburgh report, though, sought to show only that the science was not fraudulent or systematically flawed, not that it was actually reliable. And nor did Sir Muir, with this third report, think judging the science was his job. So, for verdicts as to whether the way that tree-rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia were treated by the CRU produced good results, those following the affair will have to look for future developments in journals and elsewhere. The mode of production has been found acceptable, but the product is for others to judge. Science, in the normal run of things, should do that; and if it does so in a more open, blogosphere-inclusive way some good will have come of the affair.

然后是关于学术研究方面的问题。下议院关于气候门的一份更早的报告本以为由前研究人员、现任壳牌石油公司董事的Oxburgh勋爵领导的小组会在随后的调查中处理这个问题。但是Oxburgh勋爵的报告仅仅是致力于证明相关研究不存在学术造假或是系统性的缺陷，而不是证明其研究结论确凿可信。Muir阁下在他的报告中也同样不认为对这门学科下判断是他的职责所在。因此，如果想知道关于那些西伯利亚亚马尔半岛的树木年轮数据是否被东安格利亚大学气候研究部门篡改过以得到更好的结果的裁决，关心此事的人只好从相关学术刊物的后续进展或其他途径得到线索了。这套科学研究的过程被认为是可以接受的，但是由此得到的结果则任人评价。在正常的情况下科学只能做到这样，但是如果这样的做法是在一个更开放、对社会大众更包容的环境下，那么这起事件也不至于会这么糟糕。