Top mandarin on "Climategate"

The Register's Andrew Orlovski posts an interview with Lord Andrew Turnbull, Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service between 2002 and 2005, that shames the mainstream media - and, incidentally, reminds one that the collective dysfunctionality of Whitehall cannot be attributed to the intellectual shortcomings of the senior mandarinate.

Even the media that is not signed up to the climate catastrophist agenda has not followed up the scandal tediously named "Climategate" with the vigour it deserves. Orlovski shows how easily it can be done, if you just ask the right questions.

Turnbull is forthright in his answers, and flatly states that Parliament should sponsor two wide-ranging enquiries: one to examine the "ethos and governance" of climate science, the other to make a "fundamental review of the science itself". He thinks policy makers are getting skewed and self-centered advice:

We get fed a Janet and John version - a simplified story, and the world's politicians use this to persuade the world's electorates to take action, and action soon. This is backfiring because people are intelligent enough, and well-armed enough with information. The deference is no longer there. We don't live in that kind of world any more. People in the blogosphere don't have to accept these and other statements from the authorities, and they will challenge them. We have seen that they can challenge them quite effectively.

Wow.

I see some damage to British academia, and lasting damage to the [University of East Anglia] Climatic Research Unit which is possibly terminal, really. I don't see how it can now recover. The Russell Report talks about the "rough and tumble" of academic argument. But all this is publicly funded research programs. They're not arguing about whether Dickens is better than Jane Austen - their work goes to the basis of public policy.

Wow again.

Wouldn't academics resent the intrusion, and defend the principle of academic freedom? asks Orlovski. "Does academic freedom include the freedom to stop other people being published at all?" replies Turnbull.

The Muir Russell report points out that "It is important to recognise that science progresses by substantive challenges based on rigorously logical, published arguments that present a different view of reality from that which they challenge". This is absolutely correct. But then you get the CRU scientists saying the opposite. They were engaging in groupthink. 

But, Turnbull observes austerely, this "absolutely correct" appreciation was not followed through:

Having set out the principles the enquiries haven't used them to make judgement about what they found.