Albert Einstein once said that the perfect scientist would be one who had made every possible mistake; that being the case, his last findings must be the truth. This apothegm goes to the core of the way real-life science proceeds: data is generated, adjusted, corrected, compared with similar data sets; hypotheses are put forward, tested against as many data sets as possible; re-drawn and modified, And, when the outcome is of major importance, the ideal of scientific collegiality can give way to rather ferocious competition to see who can get there first with the answer that fits best.

This results in a buzzing welter of a multiplicity of data sets, and competing hypotheses, followed by a winnowing from all of this - the good from the bad, and the best from the good - always knowing that for all the hard work, today’s best answer will surely be bettered tomorrow.

When scientists feel the issue at hand is so urgent that understanding among the general public is crucial, they don’t try to show the complex inner workings of the scientific process; they present the finished product, best answers highlighted, the reasoning process presented as graphs, and its legitimacy bolstered by a list of prestigious names, institutions, and accolades. The scientists know these summaries are simplifications, distillations of many thousands of hours of blood, sweat, and tears, but all will be well as long as more or less everyone important agrees to sign off on more or less everything important, and save residual disagreements for technical journals unreadable by the general public.

In broad strokes, this was the way the UN-created International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was constructed to collate and summarize the tens of thousands of scientific papers related to anthropogenic climate change. The largest collaborative scientific enterprise since the Manhattan Project, its reports had almost as great an impact on the way the informed public came to view the relationship between human activity and the rapidly-changing global environment. And for this reason, those who stood to be harmed by this changing worldview – the fossil fuel producers in particular – set about to find ways to attack it.

The first attempts to discredit the IPCC’s climate science were derided for what they were: self-serving distortions of well-founded science. But, after enough digging, and not a few dirty tricks, the climate deniers claimed to have found major errors, and, worse, attempts to suppress contrary views and remove them from the IPCC report.

There’s no room here for the details of this controversy. The British newspaper The Guardian published a lengthy investigation of the charges and the countercharges: www.guardian.co.uk/environment/hacked-climate-science-emails for interested readers.

But there is a refutation of the main charges of the climate deniers, as analyzed by the Union of Concerned Scientists: www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/attacks-on-the-ipcc.html. Or for fun: greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/denier-myths-debunked/climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/

First, the deniers make much of an inaccurate statement attributed to the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would be melted by 2035, despite its immediate retraction. And, this specific inaccuracy should not obscure the broader picture: globally, glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate.

Second, the deniers assert that one of the IPCC’s most important claims – that very small decreases in precipitation caused by climate change could wipe out up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rain forest – is not backed up by proper peer-reviewed research. The findings are accurate however, and subsequent research provides additional evidence of the Amazon Basin’s vulnerability to climate change.

But the heart of the controversy is less the specifics of the science itself; it is the perception that climate scientists themselves used “dirty tricks” against the climate deniers. A few well-meaning scientists driven to distraction by the endless falsehoods and distortions of a “denial industry” made the fatal error of breaking the rules themselves and have been caught out as less than pure as the driven snow, fallible and error-prone human beings like the rest of us.

Alas, those who take up arms against the status quo are not permitted the luxury of human fallibility. The minor sins of a small group of climate scientists from a single research group have resulted in a disastrous setback. It seems as though we shall have to go back again to fight for and win public understanding of the dangers of climate change and the urgent need to act upon its human causes.

A hard lesson has been learned; the deniers have lied, obscured and cheated for decades, but imitating them plays straight into their hands. Only by adhering to the highest standards of science can the lost ground be regained. The battle for the planet has always been a race against time. This public relations fiasco is a stumble we can ill afford.

Mike Wallace has been a peace and environmental activist for half a century.

Opinions expressed in this column will usually be those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Shingle. We welcome your comments, observations, compliments, and insights.

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