I’ve read blog posts longer than this report. The Global Warming Policy Foundation of London has this to say about it:
Another Unsatisfactory Rushed Job
Press release
LONDON, 14 April 2010 – The Global Warming Policy Foundation regrets that the Oxburgh Panel has been rushed and therefore extremely superficial. The body of the report is hardly five pages long. The Panel should have taken more time to arrive at more balanced and more trustworthy conclusions as there was no need to rush the inquiry.
The Panel worked by interviewing and questioning staff members of CRU, but failed to interview critical researchers who have been working in the same field for many years. The Panel even ignored, as it admits, to properly review their written evidence.
We welcome the acknowledgement by the Panel that the Urban Heat Island effect on surface temperatures records in and around large cities is important but poorly understood. We also welcome the admission that the IPCC ignored the expressions of uncertainty in CRU papers.
We also note, in the context of the long-term temperature record, its comment that “the potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work.”
In general, the report is being politely kind to CRU, but in essence rather critical of the disorganised and amateurish use of statistics. It is hardly an endorsement of the quality of the research being carried out at what is supposed to be the world’s leading unit which has received so much government funding.
Given the huge economic and social implications, one would expect that an independent audit would be more rigorous and more even-handed than the Oxburgh panel.
— end
Steve McIntyre writes that he wasn’t interviewed:
Oxburgh’s Trick to Hide the Trick
The Oxburgh report ” is a flimsy and embarrassing 5-pages.
They did not interview me (nor, to my knowledge, any other CRU critics or targets). The committee was announced on March 22 and their “report” is dated April 12 – three weeks end to end – less time than even the Parliamentary Committee. They took no evidence. Their list of references is 11 CRU papers, five on tree rings, six on CRUTEM. Notably missing from the “sample” are their 1000-year reconstructions: Jones et al 1998, Mann and Jones 2003, Jones and Mann 2004, etc.)
They did not discuss specifically discuss or report on any of the incidents of arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data, mentioned in my submissions to the Science and Technology Committee and the Muir Russell Committee. I’ll report on these issues later in the day as they’ll take a little time to review. First, let’s observe Oxburgh’s trick to hide the “trick”.
Long before Climategate, Climate Audit readers knew that you had to watch the pea under the thimble whenever you’re dealing with the Team. This is true with Oxburgh of Globe International as well.
Oxburgh of Globe International alludes to the “trick..to hide the decline” in veiled terms as follows:
CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.
Without specifically mentioning the famous “trick …to hide the decline”, Oxburgh subsumes the “trick” as “regrettable” “neglect” by “IPCC and others”.
But watch the pea under Oxburgh’s thimble.
The Oxburgh Report regrettably neglected to highlight the fact that CRU scientists Briffa and Jones, together with Michael Mann, were the IPCC authors responsible for this “regrettable neglect” in the Third Assessment Report. They also regrettably neglected to report that CRU scientist Briffa was the IPCC author responsible for the corresponding section in AR4.
Oxburgh pretends that the fault lay with “IPCC and others”, but this pretence is itself a trick. CRU was up to its elbows in the relevant IPCC presentations that “regrettably” “neglected” to show the divergent data in their graphics.
read more here
If you really want to know about Climategate, get this book:
Paperback: click image
Kindle version: click here
Of course Oxburgh was rushed. There is an election coming up very soon in the UK and Labour needs to get its train back on the track. I hope the UK electorate is not as stupid as HMG seems to believe.
Sickening that this whitewash will be held to exonerate Jones and CRU by the uninformed public, and trumpeted as validation of the AGW hypothesis’ “science” by the alarmists.
The report was probably so short , if they wrote anymore they would have have had to lie or compromise themselves.
Whitewash by the”guardians” of science,or by the promoters of tax and spend.
Glad someone else of note noticed the obvious whitewash.
Off Topic:
Another large Earthquake, this time in China. OK, who was it that ridiculed me for hypothesizing that the frequency of the occurrence of large Earthquakes might go through ebbs and troughs? I’m gonna have to blog on this today, when I’m taking a break from doing my stupid taxes.
Why did the Oxburgh Panel do such a poor job? What was their agenda? Do they think this major public event can be so quickly swept away? All of the panel should be admonished for a poor job but by whom. We the public have only places like WUWT to express our displeasure at such a shockingly poor job.
[snip]
I snip posts using “denialists” and similar holocaust related terms. ~dbstealey, moderator.
It’s depressing isn’t it?One step forward,two steps back.The pretense will end one day,hope I’m alive to see it.
Here is what one of the AGW proponents in the UK is quoted as saying in regard to that report:
“Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, called for an apology from the sceptics.
“I think those so-called sceptics who have attempted to undermine the credibility of climate change science on the basis of the hacked emails now need to apologise for misleading the public about their significance.””
Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589715/Climategate-scientists-criticised-for-not-using-best-statistical-tools.html
Won’t be long before the ‘so-called sceptics’ will be called ‘deniers’ and worse, again, now that the e-mails are again ‘hacked’ …
Skeptics had better face the fact that so far we have not succeeded in getting very many policy makers to critically review AGW at all. True believer syndrome and self interests combine to keep the fraud of cliamte catastrophe alive.
The leader of the British whitewash is a great example of this. He profits directly from promoting AGW causes. Yet he is considered adequate to the task of (allegedly) investigating the science. And this obvious and shallow whitewash will be gleefully accepted by true believers.
Except for the climatologists at Georgia Tech, very few climatologists have been willing to publicly question the science critically, unless they were already skeptical. I am aware of no political leaders who have done other than to dig in deeper on AGW in the face of climategate.
More leaks, more failures of AGW predictions, and more examples of corruption may not make the difference needed to keep AGW mania from becoming the law of the world.
I guess I am just getting old and cynical. I, like most other hoped for better but we got what I expected, propaganda and sophistry.
Leaving the white-washing content aside, I am stunned by the fact that this panel produced five pages, needing three weeks for that consummate effort.
A three-hour debate would produce a report longer than that.
But I bet they enjoyed the surroundings of the RS, and had some nice lunch, tea and biscuits …
Crikey, a 5 page report so full of holes its like looking at a piece of swiss cheese.
climateGate Whitewash, by Fred Singer:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/climategate_whitewash.html
Seems to me that this review ‘team’ found that they had no alternative but to cut and run. They threw up a token whitewash splash and ran for cover, hoping that their careers don’t go down with the sinking ship.
Here’s the ‘deconstructed’ version of the main points:
“the effects of long term temperature variations are masked by other more dominant short term influences and have to be extracted by statistical techniques. The Unit approaches this task with an independent mindset…”
Read: Temperature variations are masked by other influences and only the most robust of statistical analyses stand any chance of being able to detect them with statistical significance. Like Michael Mann, CRU has little expertise in statistical analysis, so is practically incompetent in its use.
“Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups…in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose.”
Read: CRU employed lousy methods of applying well-known statistical tools. Thus the tools were ‘appropriate’, but their method of use was incorrect.
“It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results.”
Read: We didn’t bother to check that.
“With very noisy data sets a great deal of judgement has to be used. Decisions have to be made on whether to omit pieces of data that appear to be aberrant…The potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical.”
Read: CRU don’t have the necessary statistical competence to apply an appropriate ‘cherry-picking’ of data and thus are prone to producing garbage from noisy data.
“The Unit has devoted a great deal of effort to understanding how instrumental observations are best combined to derive the surface temperature on a variety of time and space scales. It has become apparent from a number of studies that there is elevation of the surface temperature in and around large cities and work is continuing to understand this fully.”
Read: The Unit expended a lot of effort, but we have no idea whether that was efficient or not, or whether the results were sound. They are just beginning to realize that they have not properly accounted for Urban Heat Island effects.
“The Unit has demonstrated that at a global and hemispheric scale temperature results are surprisingly insensitive to adjustments made to the data and the number of series included.”
Read: The Unit claims to have demonstrated it, but we were reluctant to check the same as that would have been devastating since no-one in their right mind could believe such a thing. We will nevertheless include this sentence to deceive the unwary reader.
“For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.”
Read: This only related to the papers we actually examined. We didn’t examine papers that weren’t exclusively written by CRU personnel, for example collaborations of Jones, Briffa, Bradley and Hughes with Michael Mann, because then we would not be able to use this sentence. Anyway, we can always blame Michael Mann (being careful not to name him) as that part of the IPCC report was under his control.
“We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.”
Read: There was certainly scientific malpractice, but we charitably conjecture that it wasn’t ‘deliberate’: it was more a case of incompetence, especially in the area of data handling, which regrettably is the whole raison d’etre of CRU.
“We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.”
Read: Frankly, these men were a bunch of dedicated (statistical) incompetents who spent a great deal of taxpayers’ money to produce reports of doubtful scientific value. However, since we all have our noses in that trough, the less said the better.
iv Evans (08:37:55) :
Here is what one of the AGW proponents in the UK is quoted as saying in regard to that report:
“Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, called for an apology from the sceptics.
“I think those so-called sceptics who have attempted to undermine the credibility of climate change science on the basis of the hacked emails now need to apologise for misleading the public about their significance.””
Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589715/Climategate-scientists-criticised-for-not-using-best-statistical-tools.html
Won’t be long before the ’so-called sceptics’ will be called ‘deniers’ and worse, again, now that the e-mails are again ‘hacked’ …
=====
Apologies are unlikely. While skeptics are even -handed, many self-identified skeptics are conspiracists rather than skeptics. Conspiracists believe anything that goes against their thinking is a lie. Witness the birthers.
Oh dear. Just as everyone expected.
No data, no codes, no statisticians but quite good enough to justify the useless expenditure of sqillions of pounds/dollars and jeopardise the energy supply of the Western world.
You couldn’t make it up.
This isn’t a quiet backwater of science but one of the major players attempting to influence world energy policy.
What a sad day for British scientific integrity,but a brilliant day for GLOBE International and their chums.
Steve McIntyre has unearthed another gem in one of his follow-up comments on his thread. Here’s Monty Python’s piece on the vital role of the Village Idiot:
At 2:40, reference to University of East Anglia will be enjoyed by all. Spot-on.
At least they admit the hockey stick is flawed:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589897/Hockey-stick-graph-was-exaggerated.html
Who cares? The meme is out there now. People are now thinking for themselves instead of letting “important people” do the thinking for them. They are waking up to the fact their local climate hasn’t changed one jot in their lifetime, so it is unlikely to change in the next generation either.
Predictable. This whitewash job reveals the corruption beneath the surface more thoroughly than even the Climategate emails. The embarrassed Emperor no longer minces along, hands aflutter to conceal his nakedness. Now he smirks and pirouettes down the boulevard in priapic splendor, while the media courtesans applaud politely, pretending not to see.
Losing or being wrong is never easy. Charges of “the refs were crooked” or “the investigation was a whitewash” can be expected, as denial assuages the discomfort. But it doesn’t change the reality.
I love James Delingpole’s take on this in the Telegraph:
“Climategate scientists should be immediately beatified in preparation for full sainthood by 2011′ says latest official enquiry ”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100034422/climategate-scientists-should-be-immediately-beatified-in-preparation-for-full-sainthood-by-2011-says-latest-official-enquiry/
Wren (09:14:13),
It has been repeatedly pointed out here that the Grantham Foundation has a heavy pro-CAGW agenda, and funds only those scientists with like-minded views.
He who pays the piper calls the tune, and Grantham calls the catastrophic AGW tune — which its grant recipients dance to, or they don’t get funded. This cheats all taxpayers who pay the salaries of scientists in the expectation of getting unbiased science. When Grantham’s cash floods into the pockets of a scientist, he is corrupted; he is bought and paid for. He has exchanged his integrity for money. If you want to explain how that is an honest situation, have at it.
And to conflate people seeing the Grantham agenda are conspiracists akin to birthers is derogatory to scientific skeptics. Yours is the kind of post that is to be expected when you lack the empirical evidence to falsify the climate null hypothesis.
Wren.
As with so many on this site, I naively believed in AGW. My scepticism began with the disappearance of the of the MWP, which, as a keen reader of history, I found difficult to believe. No one could be further from a conspiracy theorist than me, but the various revelations, inadequate inquiries and continuing disinformation from the AGW camp may well turn me into one.
As always with unusual human behaviour, follow the money trail.
By the way, what is a birther?