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
Dr T G Watkins (10:18:56) :
Birther is the name given to people who feel they have legitimate questions about whether Barack Obama is actually a native-born US citizen. His refusal to release his birth certificate is seen as evidence that there might be something to the claim.
I think this report is not fundamentally far off the mark, given the parameters they limited themselves to: “…….asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit’s research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data.”
In my field, a small stinky subset of a subset of metallurgy, there are folks in the industry & academia writing papers, some peer reviewed some not. There are claims & counter-claims, and progress in the technology just kind of bounces along, getting better by the year but nowhere close to being a straight path to arriving at the “best” science. For the most part we all live with this relatively inefficient system, because the pretenders all get weeded out sooner or later (it may take many years but it will eventually happen) and the better research comes out on top.
And, one thing is for certain, almost no one publishing in my field can have their current results withstand the scrutiny of the very sharp auditors found today in climate research. Our results would be revealed as being similar to what they found at CRU, a few folks doing some research, publishing some papers, making a few interpretations & in general doing garden-variety R&D. The safety of a commercial airliner does not depend on our results meeting the highest possible scientific standards; if it did most of us would be much more diligent in our methods and circumspect in our conclusions, or else we wouldn’t publish at all.
So, this report is in line with my opinion of the current state of most climate researchers; they’re like me and my colleagues, with a couple differences:
1. When someone points out apparant flaws in methodology (data collection, statistical analysis, etc) you don’t vilify the dissenting view, you figure out if the point is valid and address it. It is the complete inability of some climate scientists to ever admit that that they may have made a fundamental mistake about anything they or their boys have done that has led me to follow these climate rows closely; rarely do you ever get to see a scientific train wreck so publically played out. There really is a lot of humor in climate goings-on.
2. Nothing in my field can be construed as being earth-shaking, and so who cares how good any one paper or hypothesis is? It will work its way out in time. The CRU folks unfortunately stumbled along in a field that others are using as a cudgel for major political, economic & social change; bad luck for them.
For the CRU folks to see this report as vindication is wishful thinking; it reads to me like they just are some guys bumbling along in a stinky little discipline that found some data & made up conclusions however they saw fit, never anticipating that their research was going to have a significant amount of scientific firepower targeted at them. Their tragic flaw is not being able to admit their efforts are a work in progress, and their intransigence on even admitting the validity of dissenting views will be their undoing.
“Conclusion
1.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.”
But then they only asked the accused, they didn’t take any evidence from third parties despite asking for it because, for example in the field of dendrochronology, some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU. So they saw no evidence because they did not appear to look very hard.
“4. A host of important unresolved questions also arises from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context. We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.”
Are they saying that “academic data” is somehow different from other data held by publicly funded organisations and that the authority of the law is somehow overridden by rights of “academic data collectors”. If the questions remain unresolved why mention this in the report – the implication of this statement is that they believe academe is above the law. It’s funny that this comes from a group of Professors.
Wren (09:56:57),
In this case the refs were, in fact, crooked.
That is proven by the fact that they did not call a single witness for the prosecution. In fact, there were no prosecutors, only committee appointees with an intent to cover up professional malfeasance. And that is exactly what they did.
The fact that some demand an apology from the victims of this fraud and coverup makes the whole sorry episode even more reprehensible.
Well, there goes “climategate”:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8618024.stm
‘No malpractice’ by climate unit
There was no scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which was at the centre of the “Climategate” affair.
…a recent House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report into the e-mails concluded that the scientists involved had no intention to deceive.
And Lord Oxburgh said that he hoped these “resounding affirmations” of the unit’s scientific practice would put those suspicions to bed. He stated: “We found absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever. That doesn’t mean that we agreed with all of their conclusions, but these people were doing their jobs honestly.”
Professor Hand said that the CRU scientists did not use “the best statistical tools for their studies” but that this had made not significant difference to their conclusions.
But he said that the CRU were “to be commended for how they dealt with the data,” adding that, in their research papers, they were very open about the uncertainty in the numbers.
UEA’s vice chancellor Edward Acton said he welcomed the report. “It is especially important that, despite a deluge of allegations and smears against the CRU, this independent group of utterly reputable scientists have concluded that there was no evidence of any scientific malpractice,” he said.
I guess Dr. Phil Jones will have to earn his Director’s salary again:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/people/facstaff/jonesp
I wonder how that book and movie deal are coming along ? Some say they are looking at Gerard Butler to play Dr. Jones…
Five pages? Boy, the art of whitewashing is really going downhill. (Will someone please hide that decline?) This is even shorter than the typical Summary for Policymakers. Oh, that’s an idea – perhaps Mosher and Fuller can use it as a preface for a second edition of The CRUtape Letters.
Wren, if you cannot see from reading the report that it is a complete whitewash then I truly feel sorry for you.
Warming of 10 degrees, the seas rising 10 metres, we are all doomed.
Apparently.
When the state feels confident enough to create a whitewash so plainly rigged as to be beyond parody, when the state is able to perpetrate such an abuse of of its authority knowing that the main stream media will pretty much ignore the rigged process then we are all in deep deep trouble.
We are witness to the perversion of democracy, its happening now and its real. We stand by horrified that the state feels powerful enough and untouchable enough to so blatantly rig an inquiry.
A few pages of waffle chaired by someone with a direct and self confessed self interest in rigging the outcome is in fact a crime against democracy. The media has by and large failed us.
When the state feels able to show such hubris and bloated arrogance, when the state feels it is able to cobble together such an obvious whitewash then the fall is surely coming.
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?
=====
One who believes President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and therefore is in office illegally.
Whitewash (as expected), indeed.
But I’m still of the opinion that the ”cat is out of the bag” on CAGW in general; i.e.:
They can ”chase” and ”try to hide” the ”cat” as much as they want, but I seriously doubt they will ever be able to stuff the cat back in the ”bag”, and pull things back over to the previously-existing side of the tipping point. There are just too many informed and independent skeptics pursuing and publisizing objective science on the www, so:
They can run and obfuscate and make excuses as much as they want.
But I don’t think they can’t successfully hide anymore.
I think it’s best to eat a little crow now than a lot later. People who dig their heels in when presented with information not to their liking are setting the table for a crow eating banquet.
Nixon found himself to be innocent.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-14/climategate-probe-finds-no-evidence-of-scientific-malpractice.html
April 14 (Bloomberg) — An investigation by a panel of scientists into the so-called climategate leaked e-mail flap found no evidence of scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia, the U.K. school at the center of the probe.
The inquiry, the second of three into research at the school in eastern England, said methods used by the university to compile historical records of global temperatures were “fair and satisfactory.” It also said allegations of deliberate misrepresentation of data derived from tree rings weren’t valid.
“There was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda,” the scientists said in a report posted today on the school’s Web site. “Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible.”
The probe was carried out by a panel of six scientists based at universities in the U.K., U.S. and Switzerland and was chaired by Ron Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell Transport & Trading Plc and a member of the U.K. House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber. They were appointed by the university at the recommendation of the Royal Society, the U.K.’s national science academy.
U.K. police are also investigating who hacked into the e- mails.
Let’s see, the Royal Society, the House of Lords, and Universities in the U.K., U.S. and Switzerland were all in on the “whitewash”. Perhaps the Queen of England can weigh in and get a real investigation of scientific malpractice – the kind that will find Dr. Jones guilty. An impartial one. Not these fake investigations, the kind that finds the CRU completely, totally, fully vindicated.
Oh, and by the way, police are still investigating the hacker.
I heard on the radio they are going slow, because they are gathering evidence against the people that hired him. That’s going to be a bombshell…
From the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8618024.stm
“He explained: “We read 11 key [CRU] publications spreading back over 20 years and a large number of others. We then spent 15 person days interviewing the scientists at UEA.”
From the Science and Technology Committee – Eighth Report
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/38702.htm
“I don’t know what more we could have done and we came to a unanimous conclusion.”
I posted a very brief comment on the article about the report at the Guardian’s website. In it I mentioned the Medieval Warm Period and compared the Oxburgh inquiry to the Hutton inquiry on the death of David Kelley, the United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, which is widely regarded as a whitewash.
The moderator has removed my comment which doesn’t say much for the Guardian’s commitment to free speech! However, in fairness to the moderator, other postings using the word “whitewash” are still there. I wonder if defenders of the Oxburgh report have been selectively clicking on the “report abuse” links to reduce the number of critics. By doing it selectively they would be able to give a wrong impression of the balance of the posts but if they did that to all criticisms the censorship would be obvious.
Am I being paranoid?
@Hunter
I concur. Rational analysis will not change the opinions of the current political crop.
Fortunately (and unfortunately), the impending Western economic collapse will sharpen their minds.
For WUWT readers who are interested in expanding their knowledge of the madness and corruption of 21st century economics, I thoroughly recommend the irreverent, and darkly entertaining, insights of ex-Wall Street trader Max Keiser – http://www.maxkeiser.com
If you thought global warming was a scam of biblical proportions, wait until you discover the delights of fractional reserve banking and derivatives.
Carbon trading – invented by Enron and administered by Goldman Sachs.
2 + 2 = 5.
Wren (09:14:13) :
“……many self-identified skeptics are conspiracists rather than skeptics.”
I look at it differently. I view conspiracists as a subset of skeptics. It is true that many skeptics are not conspiracists, but they’re getting fewer and fewer.
Today, the question isn’t whether or not a conspiracy exists, but rather how many and how deep. Witness this thread. While it doesn’t specifically say conspiracy, the word whitewash implies that one existed to exonerate the CRU. The e-mails further prove the scientists were engaged in a few conspiracies. One to eliminate dissent from being published in particular journals, and another to “hide the decline.”, and yet another to circumvent FOI requests. Obviously, there are several more examples of conspiracy the alarmists engage in. It’s not a question of whether one exists or not, but rather the dimensions of the conspiracies.
Wren For me, the core of this is the data. Your concluding reference to “birthers” is telling. The data is absent–an original birth certificate. Millions, routinely, cough one up to satisfy one government requirement or other. Hence the relationship to the AGW data handling.
Wren,
“I wonder how that book and movie deal are coming along ? Some say they are looking at Gerard Butler to play Dr. Jones.”
I suggest Dennis Quaid – he did a pretty good job in “Day after tomorrow.”
“I think it’s best to eat a little crow now than a lot later. People who dig their heels in when presented with information not to their liking are setting the table for a crow eating banquet.”
Thanks for the advice. Some people might actually like the taste of crow. In the UK the aristocracy eats grouse and quail. Some say the taste is similar.
With respect to the so-called “dendroclimatology” the commission stated:
“Tree growth is sensitive to very many factors including climate. By piecing
together growth records from different trees, living or dead, it is possible to
determine the temporal variation of growth patterns going back many
hundreds of years. The dendroclimatological work at CRU seeks to go beyond
this and to extract from the dated growth patterns the local and regional history
of temperature variations.”
Is that really true? Let us consider the simple function
y = f(x_1, x_2, …, x_n)
Here, y is the dependent variable and x_1, x_2, …, x_n are the independent variables. To invert this function for determining one of the independent variables, for instance, x_1 it is indispensable to have the information about the functional relationship between y and the remaining independent variables (bijective mapping requirements must be fulfilled).
Presuppose y represents the tree ring width and the x_1, x_2, …, x_n are ambient air temperature, tree density of the stand, nutrient and water availability, etc. I wonder how the information of the tree ring width can be used to determine the ambient air temperature without knowledge about the other independent quantities. The temperature determined will always be dependent on the assumptions made for the other independent variables. This is the weakness of the method using tree rings as proxy data. It is like determining of the numbers of a lottery on the basis of tea leaves.
In acknowledging this difficulty the commission stated:
“The main effort of the dendroclimalogists at CRU is in developing ways to
extract climate information from networks of tree ring data. The data sets are
large and are influenced by many factors of which temperature is only one.
This means that 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 weakness of the method using tree rings as proxy data cannot removed even with advanced statistical methods. The sole conclusion must be that tree rings cannot serve as proxy material. The commission was unable to come to this conclusion. It seems to me that in climatology scientific standards are excluded.
In December 2007 I sent an e-mail to the British MetOffice regarding the HadCRUT3 time series. Since these temperature anomalies are considered with respect to the mean value of the period ranging from 1961 to 1990, it was surprising to me that an average of the temperature anomalies for that period results in -0.026 in the case of the annual temperature anomalies and -0.027 in the case of the monthly temperature anomalies. This means that something is going
wrong because these differences are too large for being explained by truncation errors. When I asked what kind of reference value was used, it was strongly recommended to read Rayner et al. ( 2006) and Brohan et al. (2006).
Obviously, the members of the commission did not conduct such simple tests. One needs less than five minutes for such tests.
ScientistForTruth (09:04:47) :
Excellent job. I thought I might have to use my German but the parody was well highlighted by your article. Enjoyed having a good laugh at something so sad truely sad.
5 pages! I have read them and I am left wondering why if everything was so OK that CRU and its cohorts didn’t just let everybody have the data>
Without the original data sets how do they know anything? We don’t have to believe a dot of it until they hand over the original data and answer McIntyre’s FOI’s. Maybe Jones some in the fridge by mistake? Has anyone looked in there? Maybe he left it down the pub?
“Wren (11:16:29) :
I think it’s best to eat a little crow now than a lot later. People who dig their heels in when presented with information not to their liking are setting the table for a crow eating banquet.”
You call that information? Ok, i’m not surprised. You’re paid to do this, right?