From the Commonwealth Foundation press release
The release of embarrassingly candid emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia has intensified, if not vindicated, suspicions that scientific misconduct has played a significant role in fueling alarmism over supposed catastrophic manmade global warming.
Just days after news broke about what has been dubbed “Climategate,” Penn State University (PSU) announced that it would investigate the conduct of Michael Mann, a professor in PSU’s Department of Meteorology and a prominent figure in the Climategate emails.
While PSU is to be commended for recognizing that Climategate is a serious matter and that an investigation into Michael Mann’s conduct is warranted, the investigation constitutes a conflict of interest for the university. Mann’s climate work brings enough visibility, prestige, and revenue to PSU to legitimately call into question the university’s ability to do a thorough and unbiased investigation.
To avoid this glaring conflict of interest and ensure that the investigation of Mann is credible, the Pennsylvania General Assembly should commission an external and independent investigation into Mann’s potential scientific misconduct.
To download the full PDF version, please click here
Paul Chesser writes at the American Thinker:
The Commonwealth Foundation in Harrisburg, Pa. does not trust Pennsylvania State University to investigate Climategate hockey sticker Michael Mann, because of the millions of dollars that his research brings to the university. The foundation today released a 12-page policy brief which addresses Mann’s Climategate emails, the significance of his role, and why the university has a conflict of interest in investigating him. Commonwealth held a press conference today at the state capitol about their report:
The hockey stick controversy and Climategate emails reveal that Michael Mann may have committed significant and intentional scientific misconduct, including improper data manipulation, inappropriately shielding research methods and results from others, and engaging in a number of forms of retaliation against those who publicly challenge his research results.
Were scientific misconduct a criminal matter, the aforementioned facts might be said to constitute “probable cause” for a search warrant. Analogously, these facts provide probable cause for an investigation into Mann’s conduct at PSU.
Although PSU has announced that it will investigate Climategate, given Mann’s financial and reputational value to the university, and the likely embarrassment resulting from an adverse finding concerning his conduct, there is good reason to believe that a PSU-managed investigation might amount to little more than a whitewash.
Commonwealth Foundation goes on to recommend that the state General Assembly commission an external, independent investigation. Pennsylvania State Senate Education Committee Chairman Jeffrey Piccola has already promised Penn State that if its investigation is a whitewash, he will do one that isn’t.
h/t to reader “boballab”
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http://dailycaller.com/2010/01/12/climategate-professor-michael-mann-protected-to-maximum-extent-by-penn-state-policy/
“More surprising, the initial probe involves a committee of just three, all of whom are Penn State employees with a clear interest in preserving the reputation of a university ranked ninth in the nation in receiving government research and development grants. It may raise some eyebrows to know that no outsiders will monitor the proceedings.” . . . “So, the team consists of Foley, plus William Brune, Mann’s boss, who has headed Penn State’s meteorology department for about a decade, and Candice Yekel, director of the Office of Research Protections, who reports to Foley.”
The contact information for each committee member is below:
William Brune
Distinguished Professor and Head of Meteorology
505 Walker Building
University Park
(814) 865-3286
(814) 865-3663 Fax
whb2@psu.edu
Henry C. Foley
Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School
304 Old Main
University Park, PA 16802
Email: hcf2@psu.edu
(814) 863-9580
Candice A. Yekel
Director, Office for Research Protections
205 The 330 Building
University Park, PA 16802
phone 814-865-1775
fax 814-863-8699
ORProtections@psu.edu
” Gilbert (19:16:59) :
John Hooper (13:38:07) :
I’ll repeat it again: no-one who matters takes any notice of right-wing think tanks.
The epitome of arrogance..”
Jeezuz, it’s no wonder we get called “denialists.”
We don’t have to win over the far-right. We have to win over the moderate left and right. And we won’t do that by recruiting the far-right any more than you’re won over by Chavez, Chomsky, Moore or the International Socialists.
We are on a licking to nothing in this campaign, and the last thing we need is for the one site that isn’t tarnished by connections to dodgy “greed is great” lobby groups to recruit the jeering masses of GOP fanboys, who’ll instantly alienate us from the moderate left we need to win over.
If you think ClimateGate is a coup, perhaps you need to look at the likes of Exxon Secrets, anything by Monbiot, Wikipedia, etc etc etc. Reams and reams of dirt on every pundit we put forward. Oh no, you don’t like it, it’s all so Left-wing. Well sneer you may. Go into denial, as they say. It won’t win us this campaign by sticking our collective heads in the sand. No one is listening.
Heck we don’t even have the Skeptics on our side:
http://www.skepdic.com/climatedeniers.html
So if we want to challenge Al Gore, every Government in the world, every national scientific body in the World and the appearance of a “scientific consensus”, we have to push them to the far left and place ourselves as the moderate center.
Otherwise we just look like loonies. And last time I looked that’s what we’re being called in all but the most tabloid press.
The fact is most journalists lean left, and they always will. You might not like it, but this is what we have to work with it. We must win them over, not alienate them. And the surest way to lose credibility is to rely on right-wing think tanks for support.
As far as they’re concerned right-wing think tanks represent mankind at its most selfish and greedy. Irrespective of how you see it. Google me wrong.
“Organized CLIME”!
John Hooper (09:21:56) :
This time you make more sense, to me at least (before this one, I agreed with replies to you). But IMO this is a battle in the soul – and will be won in that arena first. Your soul. My soul. Everything else then follows like Spring follows Winter.
I’ve deliberately used the word “soul” though this is a matter of Science and fraud and being governed by too many crooks who are all in each others’ pockets. But you see how Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre have done work that has gained momentum, gained traction. How? They are communicators who value their intuitive sense of integrity enough to follow it wherever it leads- and because people care about integrity, deep down. But it takes time. And it takes a lot of schooling in courtesy all round. Why don’t you go and help Jeffrey Piccola to make his promise work? How about it? The two of you, might start to give weight…
Scott Covert (13:13:17) :
In the correlation does not equal causation Pakistan blames the northern hemisphere cooling on the US. Aparently we pierced a hole in the atmosphere.
http://www.daily.pk/norway-time-hole-%E2%80%9Cleak%E2%80%9D-plunges-northern-hemisphere-into-chaos-14311/?hnbgfv
Sounds like a win-win situation here. If true, then we have a sure-fire and relatively inexpensive way to cool the Earth … no need for drastic carbon policing. If false, then it only illustrates the void of scientific thought within the lunatic fringe.
Hi Anthony,
It’s encouraging to read this news. My associate, Kent Clizne and me recently drew media and Internet attention to Michael Mann’s role in the Climategate scandal with our audacious offer to Mann’s co-workers of a multi-million dollar whistleblower package to include the assistance of America’s leading attorney in the field and our commitment to maintain their absolute anonymity and any other support we can offer.
But a new and perhaps more important initiative we are running desperately requires expert help from volunteers to help me in our investigation of the facts behind the dropping of 806 ‘cold’ ground weather stations in one year from the GHCN data set.
I’m currently in correspondence with Britain’s Climate Minister, Joan Ruddock and I’m pressing her to come clean about the widely unreported dropping of these 806 ‘cold’ weather stations as first reported by ChiefIO
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/thermometer-langoliers-lunch-2005-vs-2008/
So far, with the help of readers on our site, http://www.climategate.com we’ve painstakingly gone through part of that long list checking into the details of the dropped stations – particularly their location – whether rural or urban and thus likely to be contaminated by the urban heat island (UHI) effect.
You may well have guessed that what we’re finding so far from the few stations we’ve analysed is a trend that its mostly rural stations that have been dropped e.g. the dropped Australian and New Zealand stations are mostly rural (e.g. Port Nelson, Ruttan Lake, Joutel). Our readers successfully determined that the station count for the U.S. (in the GHCN v2_mean file) dropped from 1177 to 136 in April 2006. We were able to confirm this by importing the data and by doing a simple count of all station ID’s beginning with “425″ for the year 2006. Replication is straightforward apparently ( I’m no stats man -my contribution is as volunteer writer and legal commentator). I’m told this is a trivial task for any application developer to write the code to import this data and then analyse it. The most significant observation we have noted is that most of the stations left in the U.S. are airports (for the years 2006 and going forward- that’s a clear UHI type contamination in itself).
What we desperately need is help from other volunteers to complete our task of checking all 806 dropped stations. I want to be able to press the case confidently against the UK Climate Minister as soon as practicable to shame and blame the guilty and to lobby hard for a re-think of the culture of closed-door science and research.
If there is anything anyone can offer I would be extremely grateful. For more info and to read a copy of my latest letter to the Minister please see:
http://www.climategate.com/allow-me-to-correct-you-uk-climate-minister-joan-ruddock
All the best and keep up the great work!
John O’Sullivan
Make no mistake about this, the world believes that there is Global Warming ONLY because of the work which was done by Mann, Briffa, Jones and a few other researchers who have emphasized the use of tree ring temperature proxy data to eliminate the Medievel Warming Period. If these folks have conspired and coordinated their efforts to manipulate the four datasets used for the tree ring proxies this is a crime against humanity of epoch scale. These data sets have been used in the 4th IPCC report as the primary justification for the existance of man made global warming. Eliminate the tree ring data sets and the temperature at the end of the 20th century is smack in the middle of the data range of the past 1000 years. Translation…
NO ABNORMAL GLOBAL WARMING FROM EITHER MAN OR MOTHER NATURE OCCURED DURING THE 20TH CENTURY!!! Kyoto resulted from this chart and all of the “cap and trade” hysteria is the result of this chart. If the MWP and LIA return to the charts as shown on fig 11 on the following, (the 27 non tree ring temp. proxies in blue) than there is no AGW argument. If these charts have been purposefully manipulated as it now appears, these folks should go to jail for a crime against humanity!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/11/making-holocene-spaghetti-sauce-by-proxy/
John Hooper:
Do you participate in any sport? If so, you must be a permanent member of the also-ran set.
In Australia we recently caused such an uproar over a proposed Emission Trading Scheme that the Government lost the vote in the Senate. The opposition leader lost his post because, as a former Goldman Sachs man, he supported the legislation. We melted their phones and faxes and jammed their email boxes. We, the people, were bluddy angry that they wanted to foist this huge redistributive tax (read electoral slush fund) on us.
Don’t whinge, fight. If you already think you’ve lost, then you certainly have.
@HotRod (13:25:27) :
the Commonwealth Foun dation – respectable, influential, serious? Or oil industry shills? Can an American comment for me?
—————-
Well, I’m not American but I do have a copy of CRU’s acknowledgements of funders: energy industry shills (see B and S in particular)?
“Acknowledgements
This list is not fully exhaustive, but we would like to acknowledge the support of the following funders (in alphabetical order):
British Council, British Petroleum, Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, Central Electricity Generating Board, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), Commercial Union, Commission of European Communities (CEC, often referred to now as EU), Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), Department of Energy, Department of the Environment (DETR, now DEFRA), Department of Health, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Eastern Electricity, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Environment Agency, Forestry Commission, Greenpeace International, International Institute of Environmental Development (IIED), Irish Electricity Supply Board, KFA Germany, Leverhulme Trust, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), National Power, National Rivers Authority, Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), Norwich Union, Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, Overseas Development Administration (ODA), Reinsurance Underwriters and Syndicates, Royal Society, Scientific Consultants, Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Scottish and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research, Shell, Stockholm Environment Agency, Sultanate of Oman, Tate and Lyle, UK Met. Office, UK Nirex Ltd., United Nations Environment Plan (UNEP), United States Department of Energy, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Wolfson Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF). ”
http://web.archive.org/web/20080627194858/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
The original page was removed when CRU shut down its webpages. It may have returned, haven’t checked.
And as a rider to my previous post, It is interesting to note that the CRU funders’ list was not fully exhaustive. I’m sure many people would like to see the full list, all entirely above board I’m sure.
You labelled the American Thinker link incorectly it’s American Spectator. Great Blog by the way I’m enjoying readng it