As the Iraq inquiry and 'glaciergate' show, the truth is slippery

This may be an eccentric view, but I am increasingly fascinated by the parallels I detect between two controversies currently dominating the news pages of the Guardian: Sir John Chilcot's Iraq war inquiry and "Glaciergate".

In the one case you have Tony Blair, George Bush and others accused of rigging the intelligence on WMD to justify a costly invasion of Iraq that has resulted in many deaths, injuries and damage – and cost a great deal of money that could have been put to better purposes.

Their case has been dissected and will be found wanting by the inquiry's eventual verdict, though not sufficiently to justify the bloodlust of their principal detractors – whose own case is full of holes too. I have yet to read a wholly persuasive article on the subject, including my own.

What makes the climate change row enjoyably different is that the defendants in the dock are not the villains of a mainstream liberal narrative, but the supposed good guys. Not powerful politicians, western and white, but climate change scientists, the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its Indian chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

We saw this process at work at the Copenhagen summit. When it failed to fulfil its hopes – by no means a total failure, as is now clearer – China, India and assorted allies in the developing world, Venezuela to the fore, blamed the usual suspects, egged on by aid agencies, green lobbies, civil society groups.

In the Guardian Mark Lynas, an eyewitness to some of the manoeuvres, wrote a fierce attack – enjoyable but intemperate – on China and what Lenin would have called the "useful idiots" who took their "blame the west" line.

In the Financial Times the other day Fiona Harvey did the same and got some backing – and some stick – in yesterday's letters column. Keep NGOs away next time, Harvey suggested; they do too much harm. Heaven forbid ...

In his interview with the Guardian today Pachauri sounds a dead ringer for Tony Blair. He won't apologise for mistakes made on his watch and believes that the mistakes do not affect the "basic truth": human activity and the use of fossil fuels are causing global temperatures to rise to dangerous levels.

Why, there's even a dirty dossier in the case, those unvetted articles – what Pachauri calls the "grey literature" – which crept into IPCC reports and led to claims that the Himalayan glacial belt is melting like April sleet in Trafalgar Square. It doesn't change the basic truth, says the doc, who is an engineer by trade.

He's also cross because some of his critics – I assume he means the likes of Christopher Booker and Dr Richard North, who write a lot on this topic in the Sunday Telegraph – have said unkind things about him and his Delhi-based Energy and Resource Institute (Teri).

A lavish lifestyle? £1,000 suits? "It's ridiculous and it's a bunch of lies," he told today's Guardian. And "there is a tailor who stitches all my suits for 2,200 rupees (£30)". I don't think Tony Blair's suits are £30 jobs any more, but many unkind things said about him are untrue too.

Whenever there's open debate about important things, people get personal. Fred Pearce, the environment journalist and author, says in today's highly-entertaining account that scientists like to portray their work as "divorced from everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships".

That's generous of him because science is notorious for petty rivalries, as Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything reminded non-specialist readers in hilarious terms.

More solemnly, so did Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder. And is it true that the Nobel committee initially offered the 1903 prize to Pierre Curie, who insisted that Marie get it too?

So underlying the details of the surface row is the more important question of the hacked emails from the UEA's climate change labs.

Do they demonstrate organised attempts to discredit fellow scientists who question the validity of some data that contradicts the main thrust: that man-made activity is heating the planet?

Reading Pearce's measured account in the Guardian, I think they do, and that efforts were also made to marginalise – as Clare Short might put it – scientific magazines that gave house room to doubters.

Read it for yourself, read the UEA's defence, and decide. But history points that way; they're always at it, just as bad as footballers' wives. Why should we be surprised? Scientists are human too.

For their part I am sure that climate change sceptics have been unscrupulous in the selective quotations taken from the hacked emails. Populist politicians like Sarah Palin, who don't know a test tube from an ironing board (I doubt she uses either) have piled in, populist pundits too. They always do.

What do we learn from all this? That Professor Mike Mann's famous "hockey stick" curve – the one that shows temperatures rising rapidly in the industrialised 20th century – was highly controversial at the time (1999).

Why? Because a colleague in the tree-ring branch of the business ("paleoclimate research" is a new term to me) had inconveniently discovered that the 11th century may have been just as warm – without a single medieval Aga contributing to the process.

Remind you of anything, all this chat? Of course it does. The shifty language in the emails, the self-justification, the underlying belief in a cause that justifies corner-cutting, the anger of critics who say that we risk spending vast sums combating climate change on at least some false premises.

The awkward fact is that the critics have scored some hits here and – finally – forced the climate change lobby to address some bad habits and even to admit error and worse. The same process is under way at the Chilcot inquiry.

I haven't checked the files, but my sense is that the mainstream media, orthodox in its belief that climate change is the great issue of our time that must be tackled, was slow to respond to the early stages of the UEA email row.

It's always hard to challenge orthodox thinking in any institution; in a university, firm or even newspaper and TV station, it's the often quickest way to get marginalised and ignored.

But people persevere. Good for them. So I'm delighted to see Pearce's level-headed critique now appearing in the Guardian, where we are occasionally a bit right-on in green matters. To his credit George Monbiot was quicker than most to realise it was serious back in December. I hope green readers do not mind the controversy too much.

For my own part, I share the orthodox view that manmade activity is a major contributor to global warming – or climate change as we are now required to call it. But I also reluctantly shared the view – which was more openly contested from day one than the hockey stick graph – that the 2003 invasion was the least-worst option available in shifty UN world where millions are left to suffer and die because we don't get out act together.

A bad call? Maybe. Let's see what Chilcot says. But Glaciergate confirms in a very different context that the truth is slippery and many-sided, that the good guys and the bad guys are not always the stereotypes we think they are and not all on one side. Scepticism is always in order, but it's a two-way process.

That doesn't stop me pondering evidence to Chilcot with regret – though Simon Hoggart's Vicky Pollard take on Clare Short's evidence was cheering. I am also enjoying the exposure of moving temperature gauges in rural China and other skulduggery, hastily covered up. Those scientists, eh, who'd have thought it?

After Mad Men and Mo, The Thick of it and The Sopranos perhaps the TV networks could do worse than check the boffins out for a sex-violence-and-tree-rings series.

Working title? Jolly Hockey Sticks.