Climategate Wishy-Whitewash

Well, the third committee looking into the science used by Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, led by Ron Oxburgh, a former chair of the UK House of Lords science and technology select committee, has whitewashed the research of course, but in a very "damned by a faint praise" way - as New Scientist points out:

"We found absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever," said Oxburgh at a press briefing in London today. "We are absolutely satisfied that these people were doing their job fairly. I don't think they even minded what the outcome [of their research] was, as long as it was as close to truth as possible," he continued.

That will have been a comfort for the CRU team. As Oxburgh put it, they were "unlikely to have worked as scientists again" had the inquiry panel found them guilty of professional misconduct.

Misconduct, mais Non! But as for competence......

The panel found that the statistical tools that CRU scientists employed were not always the most cutting-edge, or most appropriate. "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," reads the inquiry's conclusions.

However, "it is not clear that better methods would have produced significantly different results," the panel adds.

The biggest error - as you can guess was that hockey stick of climate change rises. David Hand, president of the UK Royal Statistical Society and a member of Oxburgh's panel, found that:

....the strongest example he had found of imperfect statistics in the work of the CRU and collaborators elsewhere was the iconic "hockey stick" graph, produced by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

The graph shows how temperatures have changed over the past 1000 years

Hand pointed out that the statistical tool Mann used to integrate temperature data from a number of difference sources – including tree-ring data and actual thermometer readings – produced an "exaggerated" rise in temperatures over the 20th century, relative to pre-industrial temperatures.

That this was blindingly obvious to anybody with a modicum of maths or scientific training, and became embarrassingly clear when the actual data used was released (see my post on the matter here). But despite causing a multi-billion dollar global goose chase:

But whereas [Climate Sceptic Blogger] McIntyre claims that Mann's methods have "created" the hockey stick from data that does not contain it, Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there. The upward incline is just shorter than Mann's original graphic suggests. "More like a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick," he told New Scientist.

Well that's alright then, isn't it