Some so-called “investigations” have concluded and the buddies found their buddies innocent of wrongdoing in the ongoing Climategate and related scandals.
Sort of like the fox conducting an inquiry into what went wrong in the hen house. “Innocent!” the fox sputtered, feathers flittering from his mouth.
We will deal with these “investigations” in more depth in coming weeks in a column. But for now, some highlights (lowlights?):
This is what Patrick Michaels at the Wall Street Journal says of investigations into scientific 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 (emphasis ours):
“Now a supposedly independentreview of the evidence says, in effect, ‘nothing to see here.’ Last week ‘The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review,’ commissioned and paid for bythe University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. Mr. (Muir) Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. 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. . .
“This purportedly independent reviewcomes 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’.”
Can you spell “cover-up?” But why?
As Michaels notes: “Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millionsin 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.”
Gee, with nothing to lose but tens of millions of dollars, why would they cook the books on investigating whether the books were cooked?
We like this item from a guy who’s actually a global warmist,Clive Crook, writing in the Atlantic, not exactly your right-wing deniers’ journal of choice:
“I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. . . But no, the reports make things worse.At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies;at worst they are patently incompetentand even wilfully wrong.
“The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapableof understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.
“The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann — the paleoclimatologist who came up with ‘the hockey stick — would be difficult to parody.Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for ‘lack of credible evidence,’ it will not even investigate them.(At this, MIT’s Richard Lindzen tells the committee, “It’s thoroughly amazing.I mean these issues are explicitly stated in the emails.I’m wondering what’s going on?” The report continues: “The Investigatory Committee did not respondto Dr Lindzen’s statement. Instead, [his] attention was directed to the fourth allegation.”) Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers — so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false.”
=-=
Well, we guess the foxes have cleared up any allegations of wrongdoing that may have occurred in the hen houses of climate science.
“On with the show!” as P.T. Barnum might have said.
What else did P.T. say?
RELATED POSTS:
#Climategate #whitewash #shocked #Orange #County #Register