Remain sceptical at all times

I’ve been trawling through the emails hacked from the Hadley Centre’s Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, and very boring most of them are too. It’s a good story, though, if you leave aside the obvious illegality of the hacking. Certainly, three or four (out of 7,000) of the emails seem to imply that there was a certain amount of chicanery when compiling some statistics, a reluctance to allow the public to see raw data which had not been tampered with (on occasion) and a typically belligerant and arrogant attitude towards the people they have marked down as climate change deniers. At the least it suggests that sometimes the scientists involved were not disinterested and neutral in their inquiries; that they had a point of view and were worried by data which did not support that point of view. But it does not, as Melanie Phillips suggests in this parish, reveal a “systematic fraud” or appear to reveal an “international conspiracy of experts to distort, falsify or suppress evidence”. Nor, incidentally, does it disprove the notion of man made climate change. We who are sceptical need to remain sceptical at all times, not only when it suits us to be so. The leaked emails prove nothing more than that we are right to remain sceptical.