The InterDependent

A knock on the front door at 10 p.m. was startling. “There was no one there, but a dead rat had been left on my doorstep, and a gentleman in a yellow Hummer drove off at high speed, shouting curses at me.”

Benjamin D. Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California told that story to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in 2010. “I’ve worried about the security and safety of my family,” he said. “It’s very troubling to me to think that because of the job I do, and because of the findings I’ve obtained, my loved ones would be in harm’s way.”

Santer is one of many climate scientists around the world who are feeling under siege. Some have had their private e-mail accounts hacked into and made public, and many regularly receive harangues and even death threats. A smaller number have been investigated by authorities.

Another kind of harassment – asking climate scientists to provide a large amount of information through requests under the Freedom of Information Act to distract them from their research – was singled out for criticism in June by the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Legitimate requests for information are “vastly different from unreasonable, excessive Freedom of Information Act requests for personal information and voluminous data that are then used to harass and intimidate scientists,” the board said.

Similar complaints are heard in Britain. The president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, told The Guardian newspaper in May that Freedom of Information requests were being abused to harass scientists.

“I have been told of some researchers who are getting lots of requests for, among other things, all drafts of scientific papers prior to their publication in journals, with annotations, explaining why changes were made between successive versions,” he said.

“It is essential that scientists are as open and transparent as possible and, where they are not, they should be held to account,” Nurse said. “But at times this appears to be being used as a tool to stop scientists doing their work.”

The flood of legal investigations into climate-change research – and into the ethics and honesty of researchers – began with what has come to be known as Climategate. It started when hackers broke into e-mail accounts from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in late 2009 and made a thousand or so e-mail messages public. People who opposed the climate change research trawled through the material and said they had found scientific and ethical lapses, and investigations followed.

What happened to Michael Mann, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was collaborating with East Anglia scientists in 2009, exemplifies the problem. Some notes he had exchanged with scientists there were made public, so he was involved in the British investigations.

As a result, Mann has been investigated in three British inquiries and four American ones. The last one, by the National Science Foundation, was completed in August, and all have cleared him of wrongdoing. Yet Mann and his collaborators have been criticized by investigators for not being open enough with information.

Peter Prokosch/Grida

The Ilulissat iceberg in Disco Bay in Greenland is one of the world's fastest flowing glaciers and a UNESCO World Heritage site. New research has found that ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating and that ice sheets’ effect on sea-level rise in the first half of this century will be faer higher than previously projected.

Mann is still under legal attack based on his work in Virginia, where he was from 1999 to 2005. In 2003, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act went into effect; in 2010, the new state attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, subpoenaed documents from Mann regarding grants he had received while he was at the University of Virginia, and the case became a battle over academic freedom. Mann has been widely supported by academia and much of the press. A court dismissed Cuccinelli’s inquiry, but he filed another. Last January, a private group, the American Tradition Institute, filed for essentially the same documents Cuccinelli wants. These cases are still pending.

Cuccinelli says he wants the documents to see if Mann should be charged with fraud over grants he got in Virginia. He has been quoted as saying that his investigation is justified “in light of the Climategate emails.”

Cuccinelli also said this on the topic of greenhouse-gas regulation: “We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground.”

When climate change research bumps into wallet issues, tensions can rise. Emotions on both sides are high now in Australia, where the government is set to introduce a carbon tax to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. A recent poll shows the Labor government down to 30 percent support, and the tax is considered to be a major reason for that result.

While many Australians express their opposition to the carbon tax peacefully, some have harassed and threatened climate scientists. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls the threats in Australia “considerably more serious than those against researchers at American universities.”

Some scientists have to work under special protection in unmarked offices and labs and need security systems at the job and at home. The Canberra Times reported in June that violent threats had been made against a scientist’s children.

People generally take sides on climate change, describing themselves as believers or deniers. For deniers, the complexity of the research means there will always be untidy bits of information that can be used to defend their side, intensifying feelings.

For example, if the time scale at which global temperatures are tracked is too short, deniers can use the resulting data as proof that the Earth is not getting warmer. (Some warming deniers accept that the planet is warming but do not believe that humans are contributing much to the process or that warming is seriously dangerous.) Temperature data do not show statistically significant warming from 1995 through 2009, but when temperature data from 2010 is added in, statistics reliably show that the planet got warmer over that period.

This is “just further evidence that working out trends on short periods is the problem,” said Professor Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

“Achieving statistical significance for a trend based on only 15 years is difficult because of the large year-to-year variability in global-mean temperatures. It is much more climatically reasonable to use longer periods.”

It is easy for climate deniers to glom on to more recent findings, like: (a) A temporary decline in solar activity could offset global warming to some extent in the next few years; (b) Widely accepted data now show that the so-called sinking island nations in the Pacific, such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives, are actually growing in size; (c) While global sea levels are expected to rise, that doesn’t mean that sea levels are rising everywhere they are measured, or even everywhere they were expected to rise; (d) Melting ice in Antarctica may be offset by the additional snow falling in the eastern ice shelf, and something similar might be going on in Greenland.

Scientists base their conclusions on the preponderance of the evidence, so some outlying findings would be unlikely to shake climate researchers’ confidence in the strength of their overall hypothesis. But seemingly anomalous results can lead to doubts in people who are looking for perfection in scientific results.

Professor Stephen H. Schneider, a climate researcher from Stanford University, appearing before the House Select Committee, described the tone of the public debate: “For a very, very long time there was an unwritten social contract between scientists and society, especially the Congress, where our job was risk – what can happen, what are the odds – and your job is what to do about it. And this water gets muddied by the people who don’t seek preponderance, by the statements attributing to people that they’re doing it for money, or other kinds of things. So then what happens is it becomes a political story, and the risk part – and the risk management part – gets lost in the middle. The public is confused, and unfortunately that’s the state we’re in now.”