The official UK inquiry into the climategate affair has found that the "rigour and honesty of the scientists involved are not in doubt". But it also concluded that researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), who were at the centre of the row, showed a "consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness."
The seven-month investigation by former civil servant Muir Russell found that the scientists responded to requests for data under freedom-of-information law in ways that "were unhelpful and defensive".
The university – based in Norwich, UK – compounded the errors by "failing to recognise not only the significance of the statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the university and the credibility of UK climate science" when the affair broke, it found.
The Muir Russell inquiry was requested by the university after the theft and online publication of more than 1000 emails from the CRU's web server last November. This resulted in a flurry of accusations ranging from charges of outright scientific fraud to poor professional conduct over peer review.
Complete exoneration?
The report clears the researchers on many charges, especially relating to their personal integrity. It defended the "robust" attitudes taken by scientists such as former CRU director Phil Jones in many email exchanges: most of the bombast and vitriol was "typical of the debate that can go on", it says. This allowed university vice-chancellor Edward Acton to call it a "complete exoneration".
However, a close examination of the findings calls that statement into question. For instance the inquiry found that scientists at the CRU and elsewhere had been "misleading" in the way they used a version of the celebrated "hockey stick" graph of reconstructed past temperatures. Although the initial paper gave full disclosure of the methods used to amalgamate thermometer measurements with proxy data – from tree rings, for instance – a subsequent publication of the graph in a World Meteorological Organization volume did not, which Russell and his colleagues deemed misleading.
Elsewhere, the report's own methods seem less than thorough. For instance, the inquiry team investigated only three among many instances in which the scientists seemed to be subverting the peer-review process. In particular, it did not look in detail at one instance in which Jones, then director of the unit, said in an email that he had "gone to town" to prevent publication of a paper that was critical of his own work.
Reasons to delete
Nor did the investigators get to the bottom of whether CRU scientists had deleted emails for fear they might be requested under freedom-of-information laws. "We find that there was evidence that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them," states the report. But at the launch this morning, the authors admitted they had not specifically asked the researchers if they had deleted such emails.
Russell did tell the university to rethink its attitude to the freedom-of-information laws, after finding it had been "unhelpful" in granting the public access to data. "In a new world of openness, accountability and citizen involvement in public-interest science… there need to be new ways of making results and data available," he said today. And he called for "a more productive relationship with critics", without which he felt climate science will lose public trust.
The university has responded by abolishing the role of director of the CRU, held by Jones until last November. Indeed, the CRU itself will no longer function as an administratively independent unit within the university. Acton said Jones would now become "director of research" for the CRU, working within the university environment department.
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