Get Sust! issue 47

EDITORIAL

Peer review under pressure: why we need more POE

As this issue of Get Sust hits your desktop, the 15th UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) is still rumbling on in Copenhagen, with the big guns – in the form of Nobel-prize-winning Barack Obama – due to arrive shortly. Back home in the UK, the press are still in a flutter over “climate-gate” – the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. While Get Sust can’t comment on the content of the emails, or the nature of the leak, we cannot ignore this month’s events.

The peer review process is often criticised, with some justification, from those who are on the inside. The public, however, rarely takes much notice of what goes on in the seemingly closed world of scientific research until something like the UEA incident grabs their attention.

Statistical analysis of all kinds has grown in complexity and importance over the past 30 years to the extent where the layperson is very easily bamboozled by anything to do with probability. People are still happy to think that sticking to the same lottery numbers week in and week out will improve their chances of winning; and many people are bad at understanding and reacting to probability and risk when it comes to health and safety matters (you only need to look around a few building sites to get that message!).

So in some respects it is not surprising that the people who are already teetering on the brink of climate scepticism are happy to have their ideas confirmed by the news that a handful of scientists may have done something or other to progress their own point of view (or career) by trying to keep someone else’s opinion (whether or not it was valid) out of the loop.

So, apart from the fact that the climate-gate furore has unfortunately shifted the news agenda away from the really important issues at COP15, what does it have to do with Get Sust readers?

The concern is that this incident could undermine the public’s confidence in all sorts of scientific “modelling”. If researchers can tinker with climate data to get the graphs they need (and therefore the funds for further research), the argument could go, what other data might they be fudging?

These days, a huge amount rests on modelling. Economic models have had a bad few years – failing to predict the credit crunch. Now climate models are under the spotlight.

All governments rely heavily on modelling to plan and deliver services – population growth, health requirements, food and energy planning. In the sphere of building research, there’s a considerable proportion of work that simply would not be possible without modelling: from planning the future energy needs of the nation right down to assessing the energy performance of a small terraced house (see Are the energy savings stacking up?).

Modelling will not go away. Nor will the chances of human interference with results – whether by accident or design – which has always been with us, as anyone who has worked in a lab will know.

The difficulty the climate scientists face is that without their models it is harder for them to make the vital connection between the evidence of our climate’s past, and the affect that our fossil-fuel-hungry present might have on all our futures.

For building researchers, it is a little easier to link cause and effect. Accumulated knowledge over several thousands of years tells us a great deal about how buildings work in different climates. (Unfortunately in the 20th century some of that common-sense approach was overlooked in the race to be ultra-modern, but let’s gloss over that for now!) Careful analysis of how buildings perform today can give us considerable confidence in using models to predicting how they will perform tomorrow – and in a range of ‘tomorrows’. And there’s the rub.

As things stand, there is still an insufficient pool of performance data for actual buildings, and especially occupant feedback, to firmly back up the predictions we need to make about new designs.

Once again, we’re back to the need for more post-occupancy evaluation studies, and for companies who have conducted their own to share their data (see Natural ventilation favoured by occupants in UK and India). Now there’s something for the industry to put into its New Year’s resolutions…

© Melanie Thompson 2009