“It’s not a whitewash, but it is inadequate,” is Labour MP Graham Stringer’s summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology with scientific qualifications – he holds a PhD in Chemistry.

Not only did Russell fail to deal with the issues of malpractice raised in the emails, Stringer told us, but he confirmed the feeling that MPs had been misled by the University of East Anglia when conducting their own inquiry. Parliament only had time for a brief examination of the CRU files before the election, but made recommendations. This is a serious charge.

After the Select Committee heard oral evidence on March 1, MPs believed that Anglia had entrusted an examination of the science to a separate inquiry. Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia Edward Acton had told the committee that “I am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong.”[Hansard - Q129]]

Ron Oxburgh’s inquiry eventually produced a short report clearing the participants. He did not reassess the science, and now says it was never in his remit. “The science was not the subject of our study,” he confirmed in an email to Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.

Earlier this week the former chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, now Lord Willis, said MPs had been amazed at the “sleight of hand”.

“Oxburgh didn’t go as far as I expected. The Oxburgh Report looks much more like a whitewash,” Graham Stringer told us.

Stringer says Anglia appointee Muir Russell (a civil servant and former Vice Chancellor of Glasgow University), failed in three significant areas.

“Why did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell.”

Graham Stringer

Stringer also says that it was unacceptable for Russell (who is not a scientist) to conclude that CRU’s work was reproducible, when the data needed was not available. He goes further:

“The fact that you can make up your own experiments and get similar results doesn’t mean that you’re doing what’s scientifically expected of you. You need to follow the same methodology of the process.”

“I was surprised at Phil Jones’ answers to the questions I asked him [in Parliament]. The work was never replicable,” says Stringer.

In 2004 Jones had declined to give out data that would have permitted independent scrutiny of their work, explaining that “We have 25 or so years 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.”

This policy is confirmed several times in the emails, with Jones also advising colleagues to destroy evidence helpful to people wishing to reproduce the team’s results.

“I think that’s quite shocking,” says Stringer.

Thirdly, the University of East Anglia failed to follow the Commons Select Committee’s recommendations in handling the inquiry and producing the report.

Stringer said, “We asked them to be independent, and not allow the University to have first sight of the report. The way it’s come out is as an UEA inquiry, not an independent inquiry.”

Stringer also says they reminded the inquiry to be open – Russell had promised as much – but witness testimony took place behind closed doors, and not all the depositions have been published.

How independent was the panel?

Muir Russell’s team heard only one side of the story, failing to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails – Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive – who may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU team’s behaviour – Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent sceptics, for example – summoned. Stringer feels their presence would have provided vital context.

University of East Anglia Vice Chancellor Edward Acton

The panel included Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate change (in 2007 he described global warming “the biggest threat to our future health”) and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East Anglia – the institution under apparently ‘independent’ scrutiny.

In several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt because a precedent had been set – often by the academics themselves.

The British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct. The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.

For Stringer, policy needs to be justified by the evidence.

“Vast amounts of money are going to be spent on climate change policy, it’s billions and eventually could be trillions. Knowing what is accurate and what is inaccurate is important.”

“I view this as a Parliamentarian for one of the poorest constituencies in the country. Putting up the price of fuel for poor people on such a low level of evidence, hoping it will have the desired effect, is not acceptable. I need to know what’s going on.”

Climategate may finally be living up to its name. If you recall, it wasn’t the burglary or use of funding that led to the impeachment of Nixon, but the cover-up. Now, ominously, three inquiries into affair have raised more questions than there were before. ®

The University of East Anglia’s enquiry into the conduct of its own staff at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the department and staff conduct – but clears the path for the individuals concerned to carry on.

The CRU played an important role in writing the UN’s IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir Muir Russell even calls for “a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds” to restore confidence in the team’s work.

Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics’ own making, stating that they were “united in defence against criticism”. Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to “redefine” the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their “rigour” and “honesty” were beyond question.



Leading academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events. The subjects of their criticism were not invited, not were climate scientists critical of their behaviour. For example, in their capacity as IPCC gatekeepers, the academics are cleared of excluding critical evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies. To reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a criterion: a “consistence of view” with earlier work. The earlier work here was in fact produced the academics under scrutiny. So, having compared the CRU academics’ work against their previous work, and found it to be consistent, they are cleared of malpractice.



Despite the gentlemanly and clubbable tone, the report nevertheless has deep systemic criticism of the institution and the team’s processes. UEA “fell badly short of its scientific and public obligations”, according to one review panel member, Lancet editor Richard Horton.

It criticises the team’s decision to curtail a temperature reconstruction at 1960, and splice on an instrumental temperature record, without explanation, noting:

“The figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data.”

There’s a selective approach to criticism of scientific techniques – officially, Muir Russell says it doesn’t examine the validity of scientific arguments. But as you can see, in places, it does. On the issue of the Yamal reconstruction, CRU is cleared but the related issues of basing the reconstruction on a limited sample of proxies, and using techniques which exaggerate and validate outliers (basically, one tree) is not addressed.



What did the CRU crew do?

The Climatic Research Unit is one part of the picture, an important one, but not at the heart of climate theory. They’re not physicists, and they don’t do the physics upon which competing explanations of how the climate works stand or fall, once measured against observation. So in that sense, ‘Climategate’ isn’t a ‘Climategate’ – it isn’t a Scopes Trial of the global warming theory.

But CRU does two important things that shape our understanding of the present and the past. CRU is one of a small number of bodies that calculates global temperature readings (of where we are today), and is probably the pre-eminent body that performs historical temperature reconstructions, quite literally writing or re-writing history. And its importance is magnified since the leading academics are also lead authors of the UN’s IPCC reports – the vast volumes policy makers like to cite as their scientific justification, but rarely read.

In the absence of a strong physics story, this temperature work became hotly contested. The biggest bone of contention is whether modern, post-1850 warming is anomalous. If it is, then the likelihood that we were in strange and uncharted territory is much greater. If it isn’t, then consequently, the need for “urgent political action” – involving sweeping changes to industrial policy and social policy – became weaker.

The father of modern climatology, HH Lamb, founded CRU in 1972, and the building the academics work in takes his name. When Lamb contributed to the first IPCC report in 1990 the historical temperature record looked like this.



By 2001, it looked like this.



What Climategate is largely about, then, is whether the academics were justified in making that Medieval Warm Period disappear.

Unfortunately, none of the three ‘independent’ reviews have grappled with this. The absence of anomalous warming doesn’t, as some skeptics say, make the problem go away. But it takes the issue back onto the blackboard, back into realms of the potential threats. It certainly removes much of the impetus for a sweeping and urgent political program of mitigation.

Yet in the academics’ own words, we learn that the recent burst of warming, while real, is far from unusual.

One of the leading CRU academics, Keith Briffa, wrote [3] that:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter…

“For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

In an interview in February, CRU director Phil Jones agrees that recent warming isn’t statistically significant, and is matched by previous periods in the instrumental record – such as 1860 to 1880.

The sensible end of the climate debate hinges on how much of a lasting consequence an increase in CO2 has on the climate system. Some prominent scientists who as recently as 2001 were lead authors for the IPCC don’t dispute there’s an effect, but maintain that once it’s worked itself out, the effect is small.

Proponents of large positive CO2 feedbacks have pointed to various ‘fingerprints’ which are absent, or refuse to manifest themselves. Greenhouse gas warming was supposed to create a telltale warming of the troposphere, but instrumental readings show no such evidence. More recently, they have posited that CO2 must have caused warming, but this is still trapped in the oceans. This “missing heat” has yet to be found, and in the Climategate archive we find US scientist Kevin Trenberth expressing frustration: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” adding that “we can’t definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That’s a travesty!”

For Trenberth, if we had better instruments, we’d find the heat. For skeptics, the heat might not be there.

By the mid-2000s the issue had become so politicised the academics were acting like a “priesthood”, in the words of environmental writer Fred Pearce, no friend of the skeptics. As Jones wrote in an email: “Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don’t have some of the series he wants, also partly as we’ve got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he’ll distort and misuse them.”

In a sense the CRU team are carrying the can for the physicists’ failure to do the science.

To the dismay of its sole scientific member, the House of Commons Select Committee on Science has come to the aid of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – the department at the centre of the Climategate scandal – giving the boffins and the institution a gentle ticking off.

Phil Willis, head of the committee, said it was outside the remit of the committee to examine “the science”. He concluded the affair was a product of the scientists’ own making, but recommended that Jones return to his post as Director of CRU.

“His actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community,” the report concludes.

In doing so, it’s considerably more charitable than some leading environmental campaigners. George Monbiot called for CRU Director Phil Jones to resign, while James ‘Gaia’ Lovelock said he was ‘disgusted’ by the behaviour revealed in the Climategate archive, and predicted it may be years before CRU could restore its reputation.

However, the only MP on the committee with a scientific background, chemist Graham Stringer, said that by doing so the committee had gone too far.

Indeed, it is not clear that MPs have attempted to read the emails in the archive themselves, merely excerpts presented to them by critics.

Surprisingly, the MPs chose to discard some evidence on two of the most serious allegations against Jones and his CRU colleagues: that he destroyed emails (in anticipation of FOIA requests) and nobbled the peer review process, rejecting valid scientific papers that disagreed with his theory, and applying pressure to editors of journals who dared publish them. On the third allegation, that Jones’ team grafted part of the temperature record onto proxy reconstructions to dramatise recent temperatures, the Committee accepted Jones’ method.

The Committee had made a few recommendations.

It found that “a culture of withholding information — from those perceived by CRU to be hostile to global warming — appears to have pervaded CRU’s approach to FOIA requests from the outset”. This was “unacceptable” and “regrettable” the MPs concluded and must change. They write: “Had the available raw data been available online from an early stage, these kinds of unfortunate e-mail exchanges would not have occurred.”

The Committee regarded this as “clear evidence” that the FOIA loophole allowing employees to delete emails older than six months now “presents a systemic problem”, and called for the law to be changed.

The Committee briskly dealt with the serious issue of peer review, by choosng to ignore the heated passages in the email archive where scientists discussed applying pressure on journal editors. One journal editor targeted later resigned, as the climate scientists had hoped. While the MPs received written evidence from the editor of the sceptical journal Energy and Environment, they concluded:

“The evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers.”

As for charges of cooking the temperature record, MPs took an unusual approach. The problem is called ‘divergence’ – where proxy indicators of temperature (eg, trees) no longer tally with the known instrumented temperature record. The proxies may indicate a decline, throwing calibration out of the window. Common sense suggests that the entire proxy being used should be regarded as ropey, and should be discarded.

Jones “trick” grafted recent instrument temperatures onto a proxy on dubious grounds. MPs accepted his explanation.

They wrote that:

“Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is predominantly caused by human activity.”

Proving a “global conspiracy” raises the bar somewhat higher for critics.

As to the science, the Committee said it was a matter for the second Anglia enquiry, the Scientific Assessment Panel (SAP), announced last week and led by global warming advocate Lord Oxburgh.

CRU director Phil Jones had refused disclosing his work on the grounds that somebody might “find something wrong with it”. MPs offered solace.

“We believe that the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced. Whilst we are concerned that the disclosed e-mails suggest a blunt refusal to share scientific data and methodologies with others, we can sympathise with Professor Jones, who must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew — or perceived — were motivated by a desire simply to undermine his work.”

Download the report here (pdf, 320kb).

Bootnote

Compare the following two statements:

The argument is the premises: the lack of evidence of a conspiracy does not make a false premise true. This is disappointing, and by making such a mistake, the Committee showed a lack of thoroughness.

Exclusive The peer leading the second Climategate enquiry at the University of East Anglia serves as a director of one of the most powerful environmental networks in the world, according to Companies House documents – and has failed to declare it.

Lord Oxburgh, a geologist by training and the former scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence, was appointed to lead the enquiry into the scientific aspects of the Climategate scandal on Monday. But Oxburgh is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.

GLOBE may be too obscure to merit its own Wikipedia entry, but that belies its wealth and influence. It funds meetings for parliamentarians worldwide with an interest in climate change, and prior to the Copenhagen Summit GLOBE issued guidelines (pdf) for legislators. Little expense is spared: in one year alone, one peer – Lord Michael Jay of Ewelme – enjoyed seven club class flights and hotel accommodation, at GLOBE’s expense. There’s no greater love a Parliamentarian can give to the global warming cause. And in return, Globe lists Oxburgh as one of 23 key legislators.

In the House of Lords Register of Lords’ Interests, Oxburgh lists under remunerated directorships his chairmanship of Falck Renewables, and chairmanship of Blue NG, a renewable power company. (Oxburgh holds no shares in Falck Renewables, and serves as a non-exec chairman.) He also declares that he is an advisor to Climate Change Capital, to the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank. For a year he was non-exec chairman of Shell.

GLOBE is conspicuous by its absence, however. Oxburgh joined GLOBE in 2008. The University of East Anglia appointed Oxburgh after consulting the Royal Society.

“We are grateful to the Royal Society for helping us to identify such a strong panel and to the members for dedicating their time to this important matter,” said the University in a press statement. It may not be the smartest advice the UEA has ever received – the Royal Society’s partisanship is well known.

(A parallel enquiry, headed by Sir Muir Russell, is already underway.)

One insider, who declined to be named, described Oxburgh’s appointment as “like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank”.

GLOBE has not returned our request for comment. Nor has the University. The network hasn’t had much luck with its UK appointments, as key figures have become caught up in the MP expenses scandal.

GLOBE’s worldwide secretary Elliott Morley and its British branch secretary David Chaytor were two of three MPs to face criminal charges last week. Brent MP Barry Gardiner, co-chairman of the GLOBE Dialogue on Land Use Change & Ecosystems claimed for a second home eight miles from Westminster, and worked the system for £200,000.

In 2007 Oxburgh won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Platts. The judges said they were also impressed by “his very high ethical standards”.

An interview with Andrew Montford. Choice quote:

“You can throw away the bits that don’t give you the right answer. It’s an advantage ‘unique to climatalogy’”

Read more at The Register

As celebrities met at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro last week to weep for Gaia’s disappearing ice, NASA has quietly scrubbed the claim that the world’s second largest ice mass in the Himalayas will have disappeared in 25 years.

The Google cache still shows the bogus NASA claim:

But on the revised page, it’s beat a retreat:

(Thanks to Charles W. for the evidence.) The IPCC is manfully sticking by its 2035 prediction – which, it turns out, it heard somebody say down the pub. Note that the illustration NASA uses is of Mount Kilimanjaro – a poster child for Manmade Global Warming since Al Gore’s 2005 film An Inconvenient Truth. Last week, showbiz celebrities including Jessica Biel and Lupe Fiasco headed for the summit of the African mountain to "raise awareness" of environmental issues. And what did they do when they got there? People magazine quotes UN’s Elizabeth Gore.

"I walked over to Jessie and gave her a big hug. The two of us embraced and we just cried. Every single one of us was in absolute tears."

Look, luvvies – that’s not going to help. Salt melts ice. And the last thing you should do if you’re raising awareness about diminishing drinking water, is make the drinking water less drinkable. Two footnotes to the glacier coverage. The scientist who made the claim off the cuff a decade ago in New Scientist has been given a job by the chairman of the IPCC, R K Pachauri, at Pachauri’s institute, TERI.

And like us, bloggers have noticed the irony of New Scientist magazine worried by the prospect that "rumour and doubt" may cause damage to "the image of climate science". The pop science mag was responsible for spreading the rumour in the first place – via veteran eco worrier Fred Pearce. Pearce, the blog Climate Resistance notes, is the author of a dozen alarmist books on global warming – and more on water, acid rain and other environmental scares. What might be an unfounded bit of hearsay to you or me is a potential career opportunity for the committed eco campaigner.