According to the head of the senior US scientific body notice, people are losing trust  in science as a whole has suffered from recent attacks on climate research.

As the president of the National Academy of Sciences Ralph Cicerone stated at annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, public discontent with climate science has spread over to other areas of science.

So, he pointed out the necessity of research data transparency and availability, in a move regain public trust by being more open about their findings.

In the “climategate” scandal at University of East Anglia in the UK, emails showed researchers at the Climatic Research Unit refusing to release data to sceptics who were critical of their conclusions. However, as in some cases scientists are receiving requests bordering on harassment, access requests need to be reasonable.

As Jerry North, a senior climate change scientist at Texas A&M University claimed “It seems that vilifying a scientist has become popular entertainment in the US”.

Speakers at the AAAS conference said that neither the allegations of data suppression at UEA nor errors discovered in assessments by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had changed scientists’ minds about global warming.

“For many people who were not close to the science, questions arose about whether the robustness of the underlying science should be called into question,” said chairman of the AAAS James McCarthy of Harvard University.  “Within the scientific community the answer is No,” he said. “If you took all the UEA data out of the package and removed the erroneous IPCC statements, it would not change the underlying science.”

Scientists that are currently working on the next IPCC assessments have had very intense, serious discussions about how to improve the process

Prof McCarthy criticized the way the media had joined sceptics in attacking the idea of manmade climate change.