Die Klimakrise

Steve Easterbrook hat als Kommentar zu einem RealClimate-Artikel über Climategate eine großartige Beschreibung akademischer Gepflogenheiten aus dem Ärmel geschüttelt. Als Blogbeitrag aufgehübscht ist der Text bei Climatesight zu lesen (UPDATE: Jetzt auch auf Easterbrooks Blog erschienen).

I’m afraid to say that a lot of the personal emails between academics in any field are probably not very nice. We tend to be very blunt about what appears to us as ignorance, and intolerant of anything that wastes our time or distracts us from our work. And when we think (rightly or wrongly) that the peer review process has let another crap paper through, we certainly don’t hold back in expressing our opinions to one another.

Of course, this is completely different to how we behave when we meet one another. Most scientists seem able to distinguish clearly between the intellectual cut and thrust (in which we’re very rude about one another’s ideas) and social interactions (in which we all get together over a beer and bitch about the downsides of academic life).  [...]

Journalists like Monbiot, despite all his brilliant work in keeping up with the science and trying to explain it to the masses, just haven’t ever experienced academic culture from the inside. Hence his call, which he keeps repeating, for Phil Jones to resign, on the basis that Phil reacted unprofessionally to FOI requests. You don’t get data from a scientist by using FOI requests, you do it by stroking their ego a little, or by engaging them with a compelling research idea you want to pursue with it. And in the rare cases where this doesn’t work, you do the extra work to reconstruct it from other sources, or modify your research approach (because it’s the research we care about, not any particular dataset itself). So to a scientist, anyone stupid enough to try to get scientific data through repeated FOI requests quite clearly deserves our utter contempt.  [...]

The bottom line is that scientists will always tend to be rude to ignorant and lazy people, because we expect to see in one another a driving desire to master complex ideas and to work damn hard at it. Unfortunately the outside world (and many journalists) interpret that rudeness as unprofessional conduct. And because they don’t see it every day (like we do!) they’re horrified.

Während der Lektüre kam mir die Idee, ob sich hinter der Aufgeregtheit in den Medien und den Blogs möglicherweise ein Kulturschock verbirgt – auf einmal bekommen Menschen, die sonst nie damit zu tun haben, intime Einblicke in das Innenleben unseres Wissenschaftsbetriebes. Und genau wie Menschen, die auf der Eierpackung glückliche Hühner sehen und geschockt sind, wenn sie die Realität industrieller Tierhaltung direkt erfahren, sind nun vielleicht Menschen erschrocken gewesen, weil sie feststellen mussten dass Wissenschaftler auch nur Menschen sind, die sich nicht nur Nettigkeiten hinter dem Rücken des jeweils anderen austauschen. Das natürlich nur als eine Erklärung weit hinter den sonst üblichen Ansätzen… findet irgendjemand das einleuchtend?

Von Nils Simon