Climate Scientists Report

     IT'S time to abandon the black-and-white fiction that human-induced climate change is fact or conspiracy. Instead, accept that the climate is changing and that there are shades of grey about how fast, how severe the impact will be and what we can do about it.

     That's the message from leading scientists digesting the UK's official report into the "climategate" affair, in which private emails from the nation's Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich were made public in November 2009.

     Muir Russell, a former civil servant who spent seven months investigating the affair, concluded in his official report, released on 7 July, that "the rigour and honesty of the scientists involved are not in doubt". But he exhorted them to show more openness, to shed their "unhelpful and defensive" attitude when responding to requests to share their data and to make more effort to engage with climate sceptics who dispute their data and conclusions.

     The scientists we contacted agreed with these suggestions. On sharing data, glaciologist Richard Alley at Pennsylvania State University in University Park says: "We're learning how to do this, and to make it more useful to the public and other scientists."

    But overall, the scientists felt that the main legacy of the sorry saga will be the perpetuation of the myth that the world is split into climate-change "sceptics" and "believers".

     "It shouldn't be seen that scientists can't agree; that there's black and white," says Brian Hoskins of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London. "We're all on shades of grey and we have to be able to discuss those, and their implications."

     "Within the scientific community, assessment bodies should strive for a diversity of viewpoints to be included, so that uncertainties and disputes are aired out in the open," says Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

     Questioning climate science is what good scientists do, Hoskins adds. "As for people with a political agenda, will the report silence them? No."