Research ethics, transparency and climate change

When a server at the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was hacked into recently, a thousand emails, many relating to scientific studies of climate change, were downloaded and made publicly available. The content of some of those emails including, for example, the use of the words 'trick' and 'hide', was seized upon as evidence of collusion between scientists in order to promote the idea of anthropogenic climate change, by omitting or destroying evidence to the contrary. An illegal act was thus applauded as justified on the grounds of public disclosure. The alternative is to question the use of highly selective quotations from emails (ignoring evidence in peer-reviewed journals), by climate change 'deniers' with a vested interest in undercutting evidence about human impacts on climate.

This episode, with its illegal and unscrupulous accessing and use of information (and its consequences) troubles me, partly because my PhD at UEA utilised data supplied by the CRU. As academics we need to be critical yet open to evidence that challenges the norm. Our research must have absolute transparency in methods and analysis, with clear justification for the inclusion or omission of data. Research ethics goes beyond completing institutional approval forms.

John Willott, Leslie Silver International Faculty