Firstly, let me say how much I (and I’m sure others) appreciate your new personna on the Net. I’m not sure what prompted the conversion, but at some level it doesn’t matter.
As for the substance of these suggestions, I’m afraid it all reads like the recipe for rabbit soup. When one endeavors to turn over a new leaf, it’s important to have concrete benchmarks, so one can be held accountable. While it would be nice if we could fix the climate science by altering its culture by a collective agreement to do so, that’s unrealistic. What is needed are institutional changes, which, over time, will reshape habits, and, eventually attitudes.
Assuming that is genuinely our goal, I would suggest that we begin by offering an amnesty to the Team, to give them some room to come out of their trenches, and then try to develop some new standards for peer review processes, data archiving and sharing, and publications of “summaries” of technical work for the public, or at least for governmental or pseudo-governmental bodies. These standards should not be merely aspirational–they should prescribe operationalized proceedures for challenging the behavior of researchers, and consequences for failure to comply.
To give one concrete example of what these standards should accomplish, papers should not be published (and if published, should not be treated by professional scientists as “peer reviewed”) without contemporary, unqualified access to all data and methods required for others to reproduce the work.
To give another, to the extent others agree with you that there presently exists a cultural norm of “justifiable disingenuousness,” it should be eliminated, without prejudice to those who have acted under it in the past.
