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Posts tagged inquiry
BREAKING: Phil Jones Endorsed “Evidence” for Oxburgh “Inquiry” Into Climategate
Jul 20th
[Editor's Note: What do you call an inquiry where the accused gets to choose what evidence is presented and no accusers are asked for their side of the story?]
via Bishop’s Hill Blog
July 18, 2010
…
One interesting snippet has emerged from this [Oxburgh inquiry]. When the original emails were released I reported on an inquiry made to Lord Oxburgh by Oliver Morton of the Economist about how Oxburgh’s Eleven papers were chosen. When he replied, Oxburgh said in essence that he didn’t know.
What I received was a list from the university which I understand was chosen by the Royal Society The contact with the RS was I believe through [name redacted] but I don’t know who he consulted. [Name redacted], when I asked him, agreed that the original sample was fair.
Well, now we know who the redactions were. The contact through with the Royal Society was through Martin Rees – we knew that already. The other redaction, the other person consulted about whether the sample of papers was reasonable, was…Phil Jones.
Now, whichever way you look at it, this is a funny question to put to the accused if one’s objective is a fair trial. I mean, what could Jones say? “You’ve picked all my bad papers”? And of course Jones must have known that the sample was not representative.
Reopen Climategate hearings, says UK parliamentarian
Jul 13th
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
July 10, 2010
The UK Parliament was misled by East Anglia University when it conducted hearings into Climategate earlier this year, charges Graham Stringer, a scientist and prominent Labour Member of Parliament, inan article published yesterday in The Register, a UK science and technology journal.
Dr. Stringer, a member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, was reacting to the release this week of the Russell Report on Climategate, which he considers a betrayal of an understanding that the Select Committee had with East Anglia University, home of the Climategate scandal.
As the Official Hansards of the Select Committee show, MPs believed that they needn’t examine the science in great detail following [external link] assurances from East Anglia that its own independent inquiries would serve that purpose. “I am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong,” the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Edward Acton, told the committee.
The first of the East Anglia inquiries, by Lord Oxburgh, did not do so and never intended to. As Oxburgh told Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit in an email, “The science was not the subject of our study.” Now that the Russell report is in, and it too underlines it never had any intention of examining the science, the snookering of the UK Select Committee is complete.
Dr. Stringer’s sense of betrayal is shared by the former chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, who in an [external link] interview with BBC on the Oxburgh report stated “Quite frankly, I couldn’t believe it. …There has been a slight of hand in that the actual terms of reference were not what we had been led to believe.” Other MPs feel as he does,
The call to reopen the Select Committee hearing arises because the Russell report failed to answer fundamental questions. Among these, Stringer told The Register: “Why did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell.”
Although the Select Committee had stressed to East Anglia the importance of having open and independent inquiries, the hearings failed to oblige. The Russell inquiry, the last straw for Stringer, was held behind closed doors and heard only one side of the story. It failed to interview any scientist critical of the Climategate scientists; it failed to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails, it failed to publish all the depositions, and its panellists could hardly be viewed as independent. One panellist, Geoffrey Boulton, was a climate change advisor to the UK and the EU; another, Richard Horton, had deemed global warming “the biggest threat to our future health.”
The Climategate Whitewash Continues
Jul 13th
By PATRICK J. MICHAELS
Wall Street Journal
July 12, 2010
Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.
Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.” Last week “The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review,” commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.
Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that “Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.”
No links? One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”
This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others—one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.
‘Climategate’ shows the need for openness by scientists
Jul 12th
Damian Carrington
July 11, 2010
“Like it or not, this [demand for openness] indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century.” That, say many, will be the lasting legacy of the independent review published last week into the controversial emails between climate scientists that were stolen from the University of East Anglia and posted online.
Scientists were cleared, as expected, of any fiddling of the figures to exaggerate the case for global warming. But the review heavily criticised them and the university for consistently blocking access to data and failing to recognise the risk such secrecy posed to the “credibility of UK climate science”.
It is now possible to assess the damage. The scientific evidence – showing that the world is warming fast due to human actions and presents a clear future danger – remains untarnished. However, the public’s trust in that science has been scorched.
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