University vice chancellor hopes “conspiracy theories” will now end

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, Jul 7th, 2010

A third and final inquiry into the climategate scandal has exonerated everyone involved and declared that there is no question over the science behind manmade global warming – even though, like its predecessors, it has not investigated the science.

The so called “independent” inquiry into scientists at The University of East Anglia’s Climate research Unit found that “Their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”.

It further noted “We did not find any evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC.”

The full report can be downloaded here.

The university’s vice chancellor, Edward Acton, said the report had exonerated his staff and he hoped it would end the “conspiracy theories and untruths” that have dogged the unit, reports Reuters.

Of course this conclusion is hardly surprising given that, as we have previously reported, the so called “independent” investigation was led by Sir Muir Russell – a vehement supporter of the notion of anthropogenic global warming.

While absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science, Russell is intimately involved with The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The RSE has thrown its weight behind the global warming movement, lending its absolute support for legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 80%, a process that will devastate the global economy and living standards.

This organization has been even more vehement than national governments in its advocacy of the man-made cause of global warming, calling for such drastic CO2 cuts to be made in the short term, not even by the usual target date of 2050.

For the climategate inquiry, Russell constructed a panel of “experts” that share exactly the same views, clearly contradicting the founding principle of the inquiry – to appoint experts who do not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.

Russell has called for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the CRU scientists.

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Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the scandal, will now be reinstated in his role at the CRU, despite the fact that the investigation concluded that some of Jones’ data was misleading and that he failed to act openly in response to questions about climate data lodged under Britain’s freedom of information laws.

“We found a tendency to answer the wrong question or to give a partial answer,” the report said.

Indeed, among the thousands of emails that were leaked from the CRU were communications from Jones specifically asking his colleagues to delete information from their computers that may have called the science behind their findings into question.

Yet, as reported in the London Guardian today, “extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”

The report also parroted the findings of The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee Report (PDF), released last March after just a single day of oral testimony. Like the government’s report, the “independent” inquiry found nothing sinister in Jones’ use of the words “hide the decline” and “trick” with regards to data on temperature changes obtained from tree ring research.

The independent inquiry even used the exact same wording as the government report to dismiss the notion, claiming that the use of the word “trick” may have been shorthand for a “neat mathematical approach” to ejecting erroneous data.

The STC pulled this explanation from testimony by the CRU itself, which stated:

…as for the (now notorious) word ‘trick’, so deeply appealing to the media, this has been richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context. It was used in an informal email, discussing the difficulties of statistical presentation. It does not mean a ‘ruse’ or method of deception. In context it is obvious that it is used in the informal sense of ‘the best way of doing something’. In this case it was ‘the trick or knack’ of constructing a statistical illustration which would combine the most reliable proxy and instrumental evidence of temperature trends.

Scientist Steve McIntyre, who is mentioned over 100 times in the leaked emails has consistently explained how this explanation is insufficient and falls flat on its face.

On his blog, Climate Audit, McIntyre notes:

“Contrary to [the University of East Anglia’s] claims, there is no valid statistical procedure supporting the substitution of tree ring proxy,”

“This is absurd.” McIntyre added, “The trick was not a “neat” way of handling data, nor a recognized form of statistical analysis. The trick was a clever way of tricking the readers of the IPCC 2001 graphic into receiving a false rhetorical impression of the coherency of proxies – a point understood at the beginning by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, but now misunderstood due to continued disinformation.”

McIntyre points out that at no time did even the CRU itself contend that any of its data was erroneous, so to conclude that it had to dispose of such data is ludicrous:

In addition, their suggestion that Jones and others were doing nothing more than “discarding data known to be erroneous” is simply absurd. There was no testimony to the Committee (nor has it ever been suggested) that the tree ring data was measured incorrectly or that the data was “erroneous” – the data is what it is. The tree ring data goes down instead of up – but that doesn’t make it “erroneous”. It only means that the data is a bad proxy – something that was concealed from IPCC readers.

McIntyre submitted notes to the Science and Technology Committee on this very detail of the matter, however, his detailed description was either completely ignored or disregarded.

The idea that the “trick” was not to conceal data that was out of step with the scientists warming thesis also falls down when you consider that the code within the CRU’s climate models prove that temperature numbers were “artificially adjusted” to hide the decline in global warming since the 1960’s.

This information was leaked along with the inflammatory emails referring to it and provides the real smoking gun. However, predictably, there has been no mention of the coding in the any of the inquiries.

The Russell review said it was not misleading to omit part of the tree ring temperature series but the process should have been made plain in the graph which showed global temperature rises, and which was used in an influential report published in 1999 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Again, like the parliamentary report before it, the Russell review also dismissed further allegations leveled at the CRU, including the suggestion the emails proved the scientists were actively subverting the peer review process and operating within a culture of stonewalling dissenting evidence, theories, data and viewpoints.

Those charges arose following disclosure of Phil Jones’ comment to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University: We “will keep them out (of journals) somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” in reference to scientific papers they disagreed with.

The leaked emails highlighted CRU scientists routinely referring to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation“,”misinformation” or “crap” that needed to be kept out of the public domain.

As the London Guardian notes, The Russell report described such actions and descriptions by Jones and the CRU as “robust” and “typical of the debate that can go on in peer review”.

“In the event, the inquiry conducted detailed analysis of only three cases of potential abuse of peer review.” Fred Pearce writes. “And it investigated only two instances where allegations were made that CRU scientists such as director Phil Jones and deputy director Keith Briffa misused their positions as IPCC authors to sideline criticism.”

Once again it will be left to the alternative media and blogs to expose another whitewash report, given that the vast majority of the corporate mainstream media is running with headlines along the lines of “Investigation Clears Climate Scientists” and “Warming Science Vindicated”, headlines that will be repeated ad infinitum by warmists, carbon trading scam artists and eco-fascists everywhere.

Another separate “independent” inquiry, led by Lord Oxburgh, former chair of the science and technology select committee, also cleared the CRU scientists of any wrong doing in April. However, its findings have since been questioned given that Oxburgh admitted that it also “didn’t investigate the science.”

Related Reading: Climategate Archive

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