Federico Pistono

The recent events of the so called "Climategate" made the headlines in most of the newspapers and blogs around the world.

This is the moment people like Alex Jones have always waited for, a moment to finally call man made global warming a "Ponzi scheme", "a fraud", "a reason to tax beef", "total control of our society", and so on.

Just to be clear, as noted on realclimate.org, the emails contain "no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords." Period.

And even though the blogosphere is all fired up and the hypotheses are running wild for conspiracists, the science behind climate change is not at risk. But this is not the point. This was an organised effort by some scientists to discredit all dissidents, an orchestrated smear campaign, and it's not something to be proud of.

This reminds me of a story: back in 1950, a psychiatrist named Immanuel Velikovsky (Иммануил Великовский) suggested that an object of planetary mass, which he called a comet, was somehow produced in the Jupiter system. After a very complicated game of interplanetary billiards is completed, Velikovsky proposed that this comet entered into a stable, almost perfectly circular orbit, becoming the planet Venus. We know that this idea is almost certainly wrong, as all the evidence we have suggests.

Nevertheless, however absurd and unsubstantiated his idea might have been, there is an important lesson to learn, and nobody can teach that better than Carl Sagan himself.

"There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly alright. It's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. The worst aspect of the Velikovski affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovski's ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there's no place for it in the endeavour of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system and the history of our study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources."

Knowledge is free, and data should always be made public, for anyone to read, without any restrictions, regulations and alterations. The pursuit of knowledge is based on these premises, and we shall never forget that this is the force of the scientific method. Let us not be blinded by our goal, or we will forget about what matters most, and stop being real scientists.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.