In spite of the media treatment of them, there is nothing that is surprising about the now famous climategate emails. Surprise could only come from a misunderstanding of the relationship between science, policy and politics. Of course the emails reveal that the climate scientists were affected by policy and political considerations. They had to be. Science, policy and politics cannot be separated: they are inextricably intertwined. What is surprising is how much our public discourse is still dominated by the quaint Utopian view that science and policy can be strictly separated.

Scholars of science in policy have long ago shown that you can’t take policy out of science. As Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff has concluded, “Studies of scientific advising leave in tatters the notion that it is possible, in practice, to restrict the advisory practice to technical issues or that the subjective values of scientists are irrelevant to decision making.” This is especially true in public policy issues such as climate change where much of the science is complex and uncertain.

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