Second Panel Clears Key "Climategate" Researcher

Michael E. Mann of hockey stick fame is once again exonerated, with minor qualifications

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Second Panel Clears Key "Climategate" Researcher

Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann is the father of the famous--or if you will notorious--hockey stick graph purporting to show that Earth is warmer today than any time in the last thousand years. He also is a central figure in the East Anglia "climategate" emails that somehow were disclosed, revealing something of a bunker mentality among leading climate scientists. Though the correspondence often has an embarrassing tone, for the second time an investigative panel has cleared Mann of serious scientific wrongdoing, again a Penn State group. The panel's only criticism of Mann was that he had sometimes forwarded to colleagues pre-publication versions of manuscripts without the authors' permission..

The other key figure in the climategate imbroglio, Phil Jones, also has been been cleared of scientific misconduct, in his case by Britain's House of Commons. Nonetheless, as explained in an earlier post, the dustup has caused long-lingering damage to the reputations of the East Anglia climate research unit, Britain's Hadley Center, and the IPCC, whose findings will be scrutinized much more critically for a long time to come. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing, however much it may inconvenience leading climate scientists

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