At NAS.org is a lively pair of perspectives on the recent batch of leaked e-mails now known as “Climategate 2,” which seems to show climate scientists, including Michael Mann and Phil Jones, engaged in efforts to stifle the publication of findings differing from earlier climate-change models.
H. Sterling Burnett, a think-tank researcher specializing in environmental ethics, asserts, “The e-mails show the scientists involved to be violating their professional ethics with the result that climate science in particular and science as an institution more generally is brought into question.” Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of atmospheric science, disagrees. He contends, “It is simply naïve to imagine that science can only work if all its practitioners are models of virtue; it works because the enterprise as a whole is self-correcting, not because individuals are.”