Scientists Cleared of Rigging Climate Research? Hardly

The leftist extremists are up in arms today over CNN's firing of Octavia Nasr, the network's Middle East/Hezbollah bureau chief. And some of the crazies (i.e., Andrew Sullivan) have turned this into some kind of broader statement on the "policing" of impolitic views at news organizations. Rick Moran smacks all this down extremely effectively. But I wanted to rebut the specific point (made by Gleen Greenwald) that Nasr's firing was a consequence of the "liberal media's" fawning capitulation to the "neocon Right." (The evil "neocon" cabal seems back in the news this week, by the way. See Weasel Zippers, "Lefties Blames “Neo-Cons” For Getting CNN Editor Fired After She Praised Hezbollah’s Spiritual Mentor…")

As Rick points out, folks got in trouble for writing unacceptable things, so it mostly faux outrage. But what's really killing me is the audacity of this assumption the the leftist press toes the line for some ethereal right-wing neocon power machine. Please. I mean, I saw this front-page report at New York Times, "Scientists Cleared of Rigging Climate Research." The article notes that is was the University of East Anglia that commissioned a paid investigation to uncover corruption and (un)scientific malfeasance at --- wait for it! --- the University of East Anglia's own Climate Research Unit! (The CRU was widely discredited by the hacked e-mails of "Climategate.") It's a laugher all around. It turns out that just yesterday Phil Jones, CRU's lead scientist, was reinstated in "a job resembling his old one" after (temporarily) resigning in disgrace when the scandal broke wide open last year. The Times tries to put an objective gloss on the story, but it's badly misrepresenting the severity of what happened at the time; and the paper buries the findings of a report out this week from a Netherlands panel reporting another set of flawed finding at the major U.N.-endorsed IPCC report.

The Wall Street Journal had that report on Tuesday, "Review Finds Issues at Climate Panel: Dutch Agency Backs U.N. on Warming, Spots Error, Calls for Broader Summary." Note first how amazing more objective that headline reads. And then we find at the story:

A new review of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change supports the IPCC's warning that global warming presents a significant danger, but it says some of the summary conclusions of a seminal IPCC report don't adequately discuss some "uncertainties" and "positive impacts" of climate change.

In the report released Monday, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, an institute that advises the Dutch government, found the summary conclusions of the portion of the IPCC's 2007 report dealing with how climate change might affect various regions of the world to be "well founded."

But the Dutch report said the summary conclusions it reviewed "tend to single out the most important negative impacts of climate change."

It also uncovered what it called "another significant error" in one of the underlying chapters in the IPCC report—a projected 50% to 60% drop in the productivity of anchovy fisheries on Africa's west coast which the Dutch report says was based on "an erroneous interpretation of the literature references."

The literature in fact suggests a 50% to 60% decrease in "extreme wind and seawater turbulence, with some effects on the anchovy population that were not quantified," the Dutch report said.

The review is the latest in a string of investigations focusing on the IPCC's 2007 report, which concluded climate change is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by human activity, and which helped win the IPCC a Nobel Peace Prize.

The investigations were prompted by disclosures starting late last year of a handful of errors in the roughly 3,000-page IPCC report, and of attempts by some climate scientists influential in the IPCC process to squelch the opinions of researchers who challenged the premise of man-made global warming.

None of these details are mentioned by the New York Times, which is expected, since the Dutch panel in fact finds more evidence that IPCC engaged in practices to "hide the decline."

And in a related travesty of scientific inquiry, Professor Michael Mann at Penn State claims to be "fully vindicated" by the East Anglia investigation.

But he's not. See Watts Up With That, "Mann's Grinning Cheshire Cat Commentary." And Jeff Id notes that the "Muir Russell Report" (East Anglia's commissioned whitewash) minimized the evidence that CRU conspired to hide the decline, and he includes this e-mail from Phil Jones himself:

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

It's hardly clear that CRU and folks like Michael Mann have been vindicated by yet another questionable report issued to whitewash what's been considered the most important scandal in the history of the natural sciences.

In closing, let me refer readers back to Steven Hayward's breathtaking essay at Weekly Standard last December, "Scientists Behaving Badly." As Hayward notes:

The CRU scandal is only the tip of an unmelted iceberg of politicized science, though the "hard" sciences until recently have been generally thought immune (or at least resistant) to the leftist bias and political correctness of the universities."