During the ClimateGate scandal, researchers at East Anglia were not found to be manipulating data but were stonewalling Freedom of Information requests, the bedrock of a democratic science society since the work is financed by taxpayers.

The reason that happens, says Nobel laureate Paul Nurse (Medicine, 2001), is because opponents of climate science are inundating climate researchers with requests in order to bog down research.   Really?  How?   Biology is culturally controversial, given efforts by young earth creationism proponents to get it into science classes, but biologists avoid freedom of information problems because they publish data openly - a new gene sequence comes out and it is published.  

Any detractor of particle physics who wants access to 3 billion collisions of raw data is welcome to it.   Why not in climate science?

Climate science detractors are looking for errors, of course, something peer review would also do, but rather than overturn the power of Freedom of Information requests, wouldn't it make sense for the Royal Society to instead embrace making the data public?  Yes, data could be misinterpreted, just like it can be in physics and biology, but the more detractors make mistakes and are debunked, the less power they have among mainstream people.   Zealots are always going to be on the fringes so disregard them.

Tom Ward, pro vice-chancellor at University of East Anglia, ground zero for ClimateGate, agrees that more openness is the solution.   "Scientists are going to have to get used to the idea that transparency means being transparent to your critics as well as your allies. You cannot pick and choose to whom you are transparent.   Increasingly it is going to be an issue for anyone working in contentious areas. Part of retaining the public's confidence and trust is transparency and openness, and scientists should accept that that is part of the price of having the people's trust."

We have said it many times.   Get back to being trusted guides.   That means letting people who use data stupidly do so.  Over time, the more it is shown they are making mistakes, the less of an audience they have to make them for.