Arainach
04-14-2010, 14:40
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/14/oxburgh-uea-cleared-malpractice
The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm over emails released on the internet were disorganised but did not fudge their results, an independent inquiry into the affair reported today.
The inquiry, the second of three set up in the wake of the controversy, found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever", according to Lord Oxburgh, who led the investigation.
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."
The review gave scientific processes at CRU "a clean bill of health" but did raise some issues of concern. Record-keeping was patchy, it said, while the scientists did not use the best possible statistical techniques to analyse their data.
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.
The review analysed 11 key scientific papers produced by the CRU scientists over the last 20 years, which included key findings on global warming used in several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Oxburgh said the scientific papers contained the necessary caveats and expressions of uncertainty where required. But he criticised the way these caveats were often stripped away when such research was presented by other bodies, such as the media, government agencies and the IPCC.I'm sure the American media will conveineintly forget to report on the conclusion of this issue since controversy gets higher ratings than reality. Oh well.
The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm over emails released on the internet were disorganised but did not fudge their results, an independent inquiry into the affair reported today.
The inquiry, the second of three set up in the wake of the controversy, found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever", according to Lord Oxburgh, who led the investigation.
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."
The review gave scientific processes at CRU "a clean bill of health" but did raise some issues of concern. Record-keeping was patchy, it said, while the scientists did not use the best possible statistical techniques to analyse their data.
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.
The review analysed 11 key scientific papers produced by the CRU scientists over the last 20 years, which included key findings on global warming used in several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Oxburgh said the scientific papers contained the necessary caveats and expressions of uncertainty where required. But he criticised the way these caveats were often stripped away when such research was presented by other bodies, such as the media, government agencies and the IPCC.I'm sure the American media will conveineintly forget to report on the conclusion of this issue since controversy gets higher ratings than reality. Oh well.