I know this is already a bit of old news, but I am just returning from TAM8 (which was awesome, BTW) and am behind on my blogging. Recently the third of three independent reviews of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) e-mail scandal has been completed. All three reviews concluded that the CRU was not hiding, destroying, or manipulating data.

Last year I wrote about what has come to be called climategate – leaked e-mails from the CRU at the University of East Anglia which revealed some troubling statements and attitudes among the CRU scientists. At the time there were those who believed the e-mails to be the innocent chatter of scientists and others who thought it was the smoking gun of scientific fraud. At the time I wrote:

I don’t know what the lessons of climategate are yet – we need to see what actually happened first. But how people deal with climategate says a lot about their process. Those who are making bold claims based upon ambiguous, circumstantial, and out-of-context evidence, are not doing themselves or their side any favors.

In other words – let’s withhold final judgment until there has been time for investigations to discover what has actually been happening at the CRU. The e-mails were concerning, but not smoking gun evidence of anything – let’s wait and see. Well, now we have the results of several reviews of the evidence and therefore have something substantial upon which to based an informed opinion.

The BBC reports:

The review found nothing in the e-mails to undermine Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

It concludes that “their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”.

However, it says “there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness”, notable over complying with Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

So after a thorough review there is no evidence of any actual scientific fraud, but the scientists were not adequately complying with FOI requests. It seems the climate scientists at the CRU had developed a bit of a bunker mentality and felt justified in frustrating what they felt were frivolous and harassing FOI requests. This, in turn, seems to be a symptom of an obscure scientific discipline (climate science) being thrust in recent years into the middle of a raging world-wide political controversy. There was not a culture among these scientists of dealing with the politically controversial aspects of their science. Hopefully climategate will be a turning point in this regard.

This episode reminds us that scientists are human, and therefore science itself is a human endeavor and subject to all the foibles that plague any human activity. But in the end the transparent and self-corrective aspects of science allow for reliable conclusions to be achieved in the end. After independent review the panels found that no data was hidden, destroyed, or manipulated and therefore the conclusions of the IPCC not threatened by climategate. Specifically, there were charges that the CRU did not have backups of data they relied upon for their conclusions. But the CRU was never the primary source of this data – they simply aggregated and analyzed it. The primary data has always been available from the sources. As the BBC reports:

“We find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it,” it says.

“We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis”.

Conclusion

This important follow up to the climategate story does not seem to be getting as much attention as the original scandal – which is typical. I do think it reinforces my point that in many situations it is prudent to wait for a thorough analysis of a complex situation rather than jump to conclusions based upon preliminary information. Specifically, those who were claiming that climategate was evidence that all of climate change science was a fraud have been made to look rather foolish. None more than the DiscoTute, however, who were claiming rather hysterically that this episode is an indictment of all of science.

I am not expecting any retractions.