We all remember the recent flap over "ClimateGate" and the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia. The climate change deniers made much of a few bits of those emails, especially focusing on a set of statements made by Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. Charges were leveled of falsifying data, hiding or destroying emails and other serious matters, all in the hopes that this would undermine the growing public acceptance of human-caused global warming.
Well, as the New York Times reported today, Dr. Mann has now been cleared of all the most serious charges by an academic inquiry board at Penn State. Read the whole story at the NYT, by all means, but follow below the fold for some choice bits.
One of the most serious accusations against Dr. Mann, based on one email in which he referred to the construction of his famous "hockey stick" graph by using the word "trick", was pounced on by deniers as proof that he had falsified data to get a desired result. That would be a very serious charge against any scientist, as falsifying data is a serious breach of proper scientific method and professional standards. Most of us familiar with scientific jargon knew they were wrong about this, but it certainly looked bad to the untrained eye. The inquiry board, however, was not fooled and slapped this charge down for the baseless accusation it always was:
But the Pennsylvania State inquiry board said the term "trick" was used by scientists and mathematicians to refer to an insight that solves a problem. "The so-called ‘trick’ was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field," the panel said.
The board also dismissed the charge that Dr. Mann had destroyed or hidden emails by the simple method of asking him if he could produce them, which he promptly did, proving the second serious charge as baseless as the data fabrication charge. They likewise dismissed the claim that Dr. Mann had withheld data from fellow researchers for the equally simple reason that there was absolutely no evidence that he had done anything of the kind. Dr. Mann expressed satisfaction at the vindication of his research and professional ethics.
With the board's findings, any claim that "ClimateGate" is a legitimate scandal rather than a wholly manufactured "non-troversy" can now be dismissed as the political grandstanding that it is. To absolutely prove the truth of that statement, we need look no further than the final sentence of the NYT article. They sought reaction from none other than the climate change denier-in-chief, Sen. James Inhofe, who continued to express doubt about Dr. Mann, called for an "independent investigation" and gave the following quote to cap his reply:
"We need to reassure the American people that their tax dollars are supporting objective scientific research rather than political agendas," he said.
Political grandstanding, indeed.
UPDATE:
With many thanks to silence in the comments for finding this so quickly, here is the link to the inquiry panel's report(PDF).