THE THIRD inquiry into ‘Climategate’ has again cleared scientists at the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of dishonesty in the presentation of data on global warming, but called on them to be more open with the public.
Conducted by Sir Muir Russell, a retired British civil servant, the inquiry found that their “honesty and rigour” were “not in doubt” and there was “no evidence” of behaviour that would undermine assessments by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But the Russell report, commissioned by the UEA and published yesterday, said: “We do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA.”
The Climategate controversy erupted last November after still unknown hackers broke into the CRU’s computer database and retrieved numerous e-mails between the unit’s director, Dr Phil Jones, his colleagues and others in the wider scientific community.
Circulated like a virus on the internet by climate change sceptics and deniers, the most infamous of these e-mails referred to Dr Jones using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in the rate of global warming; this, more than anything else, undermined the CRU’s scientific credibility.
The Russell report rejected that conclusion, but said the CRU graph – which appeared on the front cover of the World Meteorological Organisation’s 1999 report on climate change – was “misleading” because it didn’t explain how the underlying data had been derived.
In the run-up to last December’s Copenhagen climate summit, it provided very welcome and seemingly damning material for sceptics to argue their case that there was no real basis for the “theory” of man-made climate change, due mainly to the burning of fossil fuels.
Announcing his findings, Sir Muir said: “Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said”. And he made it clear that “we have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments” of a warming climate.
His report criticised the CRU scientists for being “defensive” and the UEA for being “unhelpful” in responding to requests under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act.
The fact that many of these requests were being made by sceptics looking for ammunition probably accounted for their reticence about releasing it.
However, the scientists were cleared of accusations that they had subverted peer review processes and censored the findings of rivals by keeping them out of scientific journals, as most of the data at the heart of the controversy was available to any “competent” researcher, the inquiry found.
The report said there was also a need “for alternative viewpoints to be recognised in policy presentations, with a robust assessment of their validity, and for the challenges to be rooted in science rather than rhetoric”.