The Climategate Whitewash Continues
By PATRICK J. MICHAELS
JULY 12, 2010
The Wall Street Journal
Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year's data manipulation scandal. Don't believe the 'independent' reviews.
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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.
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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."
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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. ---
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.
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It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking. --- Mr. Jones emailed later that he had
"deleted loads of emails" so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce,
"Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this."
--- The Russell report states that "On the allegation of withholding temperature data,
we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data." Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work.
Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]"
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Then there's the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: "On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process,
we find no evidence to substantiate this."
Really? -- In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann's work. -- Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that
"I'll be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: "I think we should stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal.
Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."
Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that
"I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute."
Climate Research and several other journals
have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. --
it's becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.
Of course,
Mr. Russell didn't look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That's because
they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.
