There was no scientific scandal, only scientific stupidity. There was no attempt to hoax the world into believing that climate change exists, just excessive secrecy. There was no panicky cover-up to hide rigged data, for no data was rigged. There was no cabal of scientists cooking up fake evidence of catastrophe. There is, however, a real crisis of the most extreme nature: evidence suggests that climate change is real, urgent and increasing. Nothing about the so-called Climategate affair challenges that fact.
This is the most important finding of Sir Muir Russell's report into emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which was published yesterday. It is not, however, his only finding. His report is not an exoneration. "Their rigour and honesty as scientists is not in doubt," he writes. But "there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness".
This failure runs far further than a bit too much secrecy. There was an attempt to restrict debate, denying access to raw data and peer-reviewed journals to outsiders and the unqualified. In a sense, climate change scientists began to ape the obsessive culture of their sceptical critics. There was a clash between the traditional academic scientific process – closed, small and by its nature uncertain – and the new political demands imposed by climate change – confrontational, in search of absolutes and intolerant of any uncertainty. One can understand why the scientists behaved as they did. But this does not make it right.
Even Charles Darwin might have wilted under the sort of scrutiny recently imposed on the Climatic Research Unit. Sir Muir's report follows two other, briefer inquiries this year, by a Commons select committee and the Royal Society. It also comes on the heels of the environmental journalist Fred Pearce's exhaustive series of reports for the Guardian. Perhaps no body of scientific research has been so intensively examined for flaws in its process: and the science – if not all the scientists – passed the test. As Sir Muir puts it, "We have found no evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessment."
The central charge against the UEA scientists is that they knowingly fixed data and hid contradictions in order to disseminate an absolutist view of the climate crisis. This was most famously displayed in the so-called hockey stick graph, which seemed to show global temperatures shooting up as a result of human action. This chart became an icon of the crisis, used, without any of the necessary qualifying labels (which reduced its dramatic impact), by campaigners for action and disputed vehemently by sceptics.
Their minds will not be changed by yesterday's findings. Doubters will point to the fact that the report did not pass judgment on the scientific value of the CRU's work – only on the process exposed by the more than 1,000 emails leaked to the media shortly before last year's Copenhagen summit. These emails, which mostly concerned work to establish past temperature records, make startling reading. Quoted selectively, they seemed to show that scientists were hiding the truth. Even taken as a whole, they show a closed and arrogant attitude on the part of some of those involved, protective of their data sets and dismissive of outsiders. The secretive nature of the CRU's work, intended to protect climate science from unqualified intruders, ended up doing great damage instead. There was nothing to hide. Openness was not something to fear.
We still do not know how the emails came into the public domain, only that they came out at the worst possible time. They played a small part in wrecking the Copenhagen summit, feeding the sense that perhaps the world does not face a crisis after all. It would be nice if this were true. But the science stands. The nations must now re-engage with it.
