The Guardian, London on climate science

The damage has been incalculable, but the original sin appears milder by the day. While John Humphrys pronounced that the public were increasingly dubious about climate science on the BBC yesterday, an independent report into those now-infamous e-mails between its practitioners at East Anglia found that their output was not tainted at all. For all the conspiracy theories that have buzzed round the web, the Royal Society-nominated probe was asked to look beyond the scientists' casual remarks in personal notes and focus on their considered conclusions in published papers. The verdict was emphatic: "The basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly."

The sole caveat was in connection with the Climatic Research Unit's statistics. The concern was not that the team had reached misleading results, or still less that they had fiddled the figures. Rather, it was that they had not always used the latest techniques in measuring the known unknown cloud of uncertainty that surrounds every statistical finding. Similar shortcomings would have been found in very many research departments. Statistical methods are scarcely taught in schools and frequently covered inadequately in university courses, and yet in disciplines ranging from economics to medicine they become the central means of publishing and getting ahead once exams are out of the way. They are indispensable in climate too, and – given the scepticism and the vested interest climate scientists face – there is no avoiding that it is especially important for climate scientists to protect themselves from criticism by keeping up with the latest statistical developments.

There are other senses, too, in which – fairly or not – climate scientists are now saddled with unique obligations. The recent and parallel parliamentary inquiry into the e-mails concluded that the unit's head, Professor Phil Jones, had been "scapegoated", but was nonetheless scathing about the lack of transparency in the University of East Anglia's culture. Freedom of information is blowing a gale through publicly funded research, just as it has blown its way through Whitehall. All manner of scientists are having to get used to the fact that they no longer have an option of sharing their data with professionals while withholding it from those they deem cranks. But failure to grasp the cultural change will carry the highest cost for those whose work is of most public interest, and there is no greater public interest than the future of the planet.

Politicians know that to be truly safe they must not simply be whiter than white, but also be seen to be so. Climatologists may not have asked for the spotlight, but they still find they attract it. Telling the truth does not offer sufficient protection from its unforgiving glare.