I couldn’t resist the pun, but this piece by Brad Plumer actually spotlights a serious finding. In the second of three independent UK investigations into the charges that East Anglia climate scientists used misleading and inaccurate research to hide evidence that global temperatures are not rising, the scientists have been completely cleared of wrongdoing:
You know, anyone who feels strongly about those e-mails that leaked out of East Anglia last November probably isn’t going to change their mind about “Climategate” no matter what various outside investigations conclude. But for the record, a committee of independent experts commissioned by the UK Royal Society has just concluded that there’s no scandal here.
Plumer quotes from the commission’s conclusions:
–We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal. …
–After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU [Climatic Research Unit] in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid.
–We believe that CRU did a public service of great value by carrying out much time-consuming meticulous work on temperature records at a time when it was unfashionable and attracted the interest of a rather small section of the scientific community. CRU has been among the leaders in international efforts to determining the overall uncertainty in the derived temperature records and where work is best focused to improve them.
The (London) Times Online has further details:
Climate scientists at the centre of the row over stolen e-mails acted with integrity and made no attempt to manipulate their research on global temperatures, an external inquiry has found.
Their research was, however, misrepresented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which failed to reflect uncertainties the scientists had reported concerning the raw temperature data.
An inquiry panel of leading scientists, nominated by the Royal Society, said that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit may not have used the best methods for analysing temperature records.
The unit had also failed to store all its data and keep full records of exactly what it had done, preventing other scientists from checking all its findings.
But after interviewing the unit’s scientists and studying 11 of their reports, the panel concluded: “We found them to be objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda.
“Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible.”
In other words, the East Anglia climate scientists did not doctor their results, and there is every reason to conclude that their research was conducted conscientiously and in good faith. The record-keeping was not as good as it could have been and should have been, and also, the scientists did not use the best available statistical instruments to generate their results, but that does not mean the science was flawed. (The Guardian piece I quote from further down provides additional perspective on the record-keeping and statistics issues.) Unsurprisingly, industry-funded organizations like this one, quoted in the Washington Post, are still grumbling:
Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, called it a “superficial investigation.”
“They don’t even make a minimal effort to rebut the obvious appearance of widespread data manipulation, suppression of dissenting research through improper means and intentional avoidance of complying with Freedom of Information requests,” said Ebell, whose think tank accepts funding from energy interests.
Lord Oxburgh, who headed the investigation, told The Guardian that it turned up “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever.” He also said that ideology probably had a lot to do with the uproar:
Instead, Oxburgh said, many of the criticisms and assertions of scientific misconduct were likely made by people “who do not like the implications of some the conclusions” reached by the climate experts.
He said the allegations made against the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, including its director Phil Jones, were serious enough to end their careers if proven correct.
Oxburgh said: “Whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly.”
In the same Guardian piece, a professional statistician who also sat on the panel put the criticisms of the climate scientists’ record-keeping and use of statistics in context:
David Hand, a statistician at Imperial College London, who sat on the enquiry panel, said the CRU scientists had been naive over their use of statistics, but there was no evidence that the better techniques would have produced different results. Poor record-keeping was common among scientists, Oxburgh said, while the CRU experts could not have anticipated the future public interest in what had been an “unfashionable” area of science for much of their careers.
A great deal more valuable information is included in the Guardian article — much of it not included in other coverage I’ve seen — and it’s full of links leading to yet more information.
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