By Roger F. Gay, mensnewsdaily.com
As CNN explains it; "An independent report released Wednesday into the leaked "Climategate" e-mails found no evidence to question the "rigor and honesty" of scientists involved." That seems to be the general conclusion offered by Muir Russell, chairman of the select group of political insiders who conducted the review.
The review focused on "the behaviors of the scientists in the climatic research unit in the University of East Anglia," which was at the center of the Climategate scandal. Russell provided a carefully worded public statement on the review.
"Those behaviors have been commented on in the light of a release - an improper release of emails in the autumn of 2009, not long before the Copenhagen conference. We went through this very carefully and we concluded that these behaviors did not damage our judgment of the integrity, the honesty, the rigor with which they had operated as scientists. And that's a comment about the processes that they went through to produce their work, to handle their data, to have their work peer-reviewed, and so on. A lot of what they do makes a big impact on the advice that goes to policy-makers, both domestically and internationally, and we concluded similarly that these behaviors that were the subject of criticism had not affected the impact on the policy advice. What we did however conclude was that they had not shown sufficient openness in the way in which they responded to requests for information about what they were doing, about the data they were processing, about the stations they were analyzing, and so on. And we've made a number of recommendations both for them and for the University of East Anglia in terms of how it manages its freedom of information process, and how it manages its risk process."
It's a bit of a brain-sneezer to imply that the researchers operated generally as good and proper scientists in the way data was handled, their work was produced and reviewed, and then state that they were deficient in providing information essential to the processes. If the data can't be confirmed and the details of work aren't explained, it's not science. A series of unsupportable statements promoting an idea isn't science, it's a marketing campaign.
Leave a comment