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File photoshows a polar bear on the ice outside Churchill, Mantioba, Canada. Afoundation set up by Charles Koch, who with his brother controls KochIndustries, a huge privately-owned US company dominated by oil andchemical interests, partly funded a report published in 2007 that saidpolar bears were not endangered by climate change, a Greenpeace reportsaid.

UK 'Climategate' inquiry largely clears scientists

LONDON – The first of several British investigations into the e-mailsleaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers haslargely vindicated the scientists involved.

The House of Commons' Science and TechnologyCommittee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support chargesthat the University ofEast Anglia's ClimaticResearch Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data orperverted the peer reviewprocess to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most seriouscriticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, asfar as it was able to ascertain, "the scientific reputation of ProfessorJones and CRU remains intact," adding that nothing in the more than1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication,challenged scientific consensus that "global warming is happening andthat it is induced by human activity."

The 14-member committee's investigation isone of three launched after the dissemination, in November, of e-mailsand data stolen from the research unit. The e-mails appeared to showscientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks,discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways tokeep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals. One thatattracted particular media attention was Jones' reference to a "trick"that could be used to "hide the decline" of temperatures.

The e-mails' publication ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summitsparked an online furor, with skeptics of man-made climate change callingthe e-mails' publication "Climategate" and claiming them as proof thatthe science behind global warming had been exaggerated — or even made upaltogether.

The lawmakers said they decided toinvestigate due to "the serious implications for U.K. science."

PhilWillis, the committee's chairman, said of the e-mails that"there's no denying that some of them were pretty appalling." But thecommittee found no evidence of anything beyond "a blunt refusal to sharedata," adding that the idea that Jones was part of a conspiracy to hideevidence that weakened the case for global warming was clearly wrong.

In a briefing to journalists ahead of thereport's release, Willis said the controversy would ultimately helpbuttress the case for global warming by forcing the University of East Anglia— and other researchinstitutions — to stop hoarding their data.

"The winner in the end will be climatescience itself," he said.

The winner on Wednesday was Jones, whostepped down temporarily as chief of the climate research unit about a week afterthe e-mail scandal broke. The committee expressed sympathy with Jones,whom Willis said had been made a scapegoat for larger problems withinthe climate sciencecommunity.

"The focus on Professor Jones and the CRU hasbeen largely misplaced," the report said.

But the lawmakers did criticize the way Jonesand his colleagues handled freedom of information requests, sayingscientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressivelypublishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewalltheir critics.

Lawmakers stressed that their report — whichwas written after only a single day of oral testimony — did not coverall the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiriesinto the e-mail scandal that are still pending.

Willis said the lawmakers had been in a rushto publish something before Britain's next national election, which iswidely expected in just over a month's time.

"Clearly we would have liked to spend moretime of this," he said, before adding jokingly: "We had to get somethingout before we were sent packing."

One of the two pending inquiries is beingheaded by former civil servant Muir Russell, who is looking into whetherscientists, including Jones, fudged data or manipulated the peer review process. Italso is examining the extent to which university followed applicable freedom of information laws.That report is due to report sometime this spring.

Geologist Ernest Oxburgh is leading aparallel investigation into the integrity of the science itself, onestaffed by academics including Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorologyat the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, and Huw Davies, a former president of the International Associationof Meteorology & AtmosphericScience.

The committee said that climate scientistshad to be much more open in future — for example by publishing all theirdata, including raw data and the software programs used to interpretthem, to the Internet. Willis said there was far too much money at stakenot to be completely transparent.

"Governments across the world are spending trillions of pounds, ortrillions of dollars, on mitigating climate change. The science has got to beirreproachable," he said.   

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