Dr. Mann Exonerated, and Other Climate Science News

From DeSmogBlog is an article about Penn State University’s investigation into allegations of cover-up and impropriety on the part of climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann.  As their report states, the university was prompted to investigate Dr. Mann after it:

began to receive numerous communications (emails, phone calls and letters) accusing Dr. Michael E. Mann of having engaged in acts that included manipulating data, destroying records and colluding to hamper the progress of scientific discourse around the issue of anthropogenic global warming from approximately 1998. These accusations were based on perceptions of the content of the widely reported theft of emails from a server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain.

Dr. Mann was cleared of any wrong doing in 3 of the 4 allegations outright – as the university’s report states, there is no “credible evidence” to substantiate any of the accusations brought against him.  As for the 4th allegation, that Dr. Mann seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities, a separate panel of faculty members will pursue a follow-up investigation to satisfy the critics, so the verdict is still pending on that one.

It seems, though, that credible evidence is something that climate change denialists aren’t that familiar with.  According to DeSmogBlog, the denialists are trying to spin the university’s exoneration as a “whitewash”.  Click here to read the full article on DeSmogBlog.com, or click here to read the full university report.

Meanwhile, Matthew Bramley of the Alberta-based Pembina Institute discusses the Harper government’s failure to address the looming climate crisis and  formulate its own climate change plan in “Hitched to the U.S., Canada is going nowhere fast”.

Kate at Climate Sight just posted “A Good Batch Of News” where she discusses an article by Phil Duffy that discusses the fact that medical errors occur all the time (I spent 20 years working as a nurse, I know how true that is!) yet nobody is calling for a massive inquiry into the science underpinning modern medicine, or the engineering foundations of the car industry because Toyota has just issued a massive recall.

But pseudoskeptics argue that the IPCC is systematically fraudulent simply because a couple of statements among thousands of pages of heavily edited and re-editing (and re-re-edited) documents cite gray literature instead of the peer-reviewed literature that supplied the science in the first place.

This posting also discusses the censorship of comments on blogs, where she makes the astute comment that:

that the vast majority of Internet discussions regarding climate change turn into such a food fight that reasonable and insightful discussion falls through the cracks. Well-meaning and fact-checking people are so busy responding to the same old objections, or are so intimidated by trolling commentators (quick poll – who here has been called a Nazi for explaining basic atmospheric science?), that they do not post the wonderfully thought-provoking things that they have to say.

Click here to read the full article.

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