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Grendel
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I keep hearing it was bit of a "whitewash" Mozz and the terms of reference made it so.
of course you could google more diverse opinion if you were fair dinkum...
like I did...
Climategate Investigation A Monumental Whitewash
One down, two to go: First “investigation” into data fixing scandal clears scientists, says warming is real
Steve Watson
A Parliamentary investigation into the climategate scandal has cleared the scientists involved of any data fixing and subversion of the peer review process, and notes that the scandal provides no evidence to challenge the notion that human activity is causing catastrophic global warming.
The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee Report (PDF), the first of three investigations into climategate, produced its report after only a single day of oral testimony.
The report concludes that UN IPCC affiliated scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, led by director Phil Jones (pictured at the hearing), did not tamper with data in an effort to exaggerate the threat of global warming.
The Report states that “The scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact”.
The committee added that it found nothing sinister in Jones’ use of the words “hide the decline” and “trick” with regards to data on temperature changes.
The committee contends that when Jones stated “hide the decline” in an email to his colleagues, he was referring to discarding erroneous data, rather than deliberately concealing it.
The report also states that Jones’ use of the word ‘trick’ “appears to be a colloquialism for a ‘neat’ method of handling data.”
The Committee 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 hacked emails has consistently explained how this explanation is insufficient and falls flat on its face.
On his blog, Climate Audit, McIntyre rebuts the Parliamentary Committee’s conclusion, noting:
“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, it seems his detailed description has been completely 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 is no mention of the coding in the STC report.
With reference to charges of subverting the peer review process by Jones and the CRU, the report states “the evidence we have seen does not suggest that Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process”, adding that academics should not be criticised for “informal comments” on papers.
So when Phil Jones wrote the following to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University: We “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” that was not a declaration of intent, according to the STC investigation.
The committee essentially believes it is A-OK for the CRU scientists to routinely refer to any research offering alternate viewpoints as “disinformation“,”misinformation” or “crap” that needs to be kept out of the public domain. The committee sees no problem with the fact that those same scientists have the power to do just that.
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EVIDENCE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A SCAM? (Read 48480 times)
