Michael Mann (courtesy Penn State U.)
More details on the pending inquiry into the conduct of Dr. Michael E. Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State University, were revealed today in Penn State's student newspaper. But this inquiry still leaves many questions unanswered.
Mann, of Hockey Stick fame, is named in at least 271 e-mails and one eleven-page copy of a letter by him to a US congressional committee that had inquired into his work in 2005. Though Penn State does not state officially what prompted their inquiry, the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, mentions the request made to Mann by Phil Jones, director of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, that he delete certain e-mails relating to the then-upcoming Fourth Assessment Report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Lisa Powers, spokeswoman for Penn State, told The Daily Collegian that an ad hoc committee would review each and every one of the e-mails, a process that "could take quite some time." Mann himself indicated to the student paper that he was not afraid of the inquiry.
When The Daily Collegian asked Mann about Phil Jones' request for deletion of information, Mann acknowledged having received the request, but denied having made any deletions himself and suggested that no one else did, either. But that statement is at variance, not only with Phil Jones' initial letter to Mann, but also with Mann's immediate reply.
Eugene R. Wahl (courtesy NCDC)
In File No. 1212073451.txt, Phil Jones makes this specific request:
Mike:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
The "Keith" referred to is never identified but is most probably Keith Briffa, Jones' second-in-command at CRU. "AR4" refers to Fourth Assessment Report, the latest such report issued by the UN-IPCC.
The "Gene" presumably is Eugene R. Wahl, who is now employed at the National Climatic Data Center as part of its Paleoclimatology program. And in File No. 1212063122.txt (Mann to Jones, on subject "Re IPCC & FOI"), Mann makes this especially damaging statement:
I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
The above e-mail is (or was) a personal e-mail. A request-for-comment at Dr. Wahl's official e-mail address at NCDC is now pending. The reply e-mail carries a timestamp on May 29, 2008, consistent with Wahl's employment at NCDC.
Hockey Stick graph (from WMO 1999 report)
Mann also said this concerning Jones: "Someone being constantly under attack could be what causes them to make a poor decision." He did not say what that "poor decision" might have been or whether he had considered Jones' request to him appropriate or inappropriate.
Mann is most famous for promulgating the "Hockey Stick" graph that appeared in the World Meteorogical Organization's 1999 statement on climate change. Skepticism about the accuracy of that graph came to a head in 2005 and was the subject of two separate reviews that apparently came to two different conclusions about it, one from the National Academy of Sciences and the other from an ad hoc committee chaired by Edward Wegman of George Mason University.
Separately, according to the Financial Post (Canada), the University of East Anglia abruptly released all the data it had on Saturday, and announced plans to conduct an investigation of their own.
Like this article? Want to be notified of more? Click Subscribe above.
Comments
Good Article! Keep after them!
Don't forget to Google this:
NYGOE "Climategate The Video"
Keep up the good work...Post to LinkedIn.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The falsification of data and the conspiracy to commit same etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. Further, the granting of public funds for research warrants a federal investigation. I’m hoping the perpetrators, including possibly Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows. -- Michael Santomauro
Good article, but I think there's a lot more to this ClimateGate picture. This small (2 to 3 dozen) cabal of climate scientists could not have possibly gotten to this point without extraordinary funding, political support at virtually all levels of government, especially at the national level and unparalleled cooperation from the national and world media. This wide-spread networked support continues even as we the people puzzle over what this is all about. I ask you, "What are you seeing and hearing from our national media on the subject?" Anything? What are you seeing and hearing from all levels of our government, local and regional newspapers and media outlets? Anything of substance? At all of these levels the chatter has remained remarkably quite on the subject, wouldn't you say? Why? What points and positions are you beginning to hear on the radio and see on the television? This cabal of scientists has an unprecedented level of support given the revelations contained in
@John A. Jauregui--Many have commented on all the things you've mentioned. Certainly those men would not have gotten so far, had they not been telling an awful lot of powerful people what they wanted to hear, and what those same people thought that the world ought to hear. But is it a cabal of evil financiers that we now need to look for? I don't think so. Never underestimate the power of an idea, even a bad idea. And to paraphrase the actor Stephen Boyd, who portrayed a Roman garrison commander in a well-known film, there's only one way to fight an idea: with another idea.
Should be a special prosecuter appointed.There will be a lot of very powerful people involved.No University investigation will shed any light on this.
This is what the AR4 deletions is about.
25 May 2008, Steve McIntyre revealed that an improper extension had been made to the publication deadline for papers to be cited in AR4, in order to save some papers from being pulled from the IPCC assessment including one from Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann. In doing so an extra, improper and unreported comment period was added. Email 1154353922 tells us that unpublished comments from this were sent from the TSU via Jonathan Overpeck to Keith Briffa.
27 May 2008, I made a FOIA request to UEA for these comments and all AR4 correspondence on Ammann and Wahl. Email 1153470204 and 1155402164 is the sort of info I wanted to see. Tim Osborn in 1211924186 first asks Ammann if he could remember that all their emails were "confidential". UEA discuss what to do in 1212009215, 28 May, and on 29 May Jones sends his request to Mann to delete AR4 emails shown in 1212063122.
I have sent a letter to Penn State University explaining this in more det
(according to The Daily Collegian) Penn State's investigation into Michael Mann's activities would be concluded on January 29,2010. The article didnt say how many years it might take for them to comment I guess. As for Penn State's ability to investigate themselves, inspector closeau commented. "There are times to laugh and times not to laugh, and this is not one of them.
The investigation should include testifying under oath and investigation of all internal documents of lead authors on the basis for IPCC FAR WG1 and Special report to policy makers managing of the storyline to force policy. IPCC and the climate advocacy has focused too much on making policy/shaping the outcome while restricting criticism and access. This contaminates the scientific process. SRES authors warned IPCC in 2004 to not represent scenario outputs as forecasts. The urgency is based on IPCC storyline ramp up 2010-2100 with most damage in the latter years. Steven Schneider would extend this to two centuries for greater alarm. IPCC said the models have inadequate treatment water vapor, clouds, solar variability, and other feedbacks so the models are knowingly underspecified. They are analogous to macroecon policy models, so let’s call them "policy (structural) models" not “done deal, this is real, it’s over” science which is dceception.
The so called dozens of climatologists is acatually a much larger 97% consensus of all climatologists currently publishing work.
Edward Wegman is now under investigation for plagiarism and academic misconduct for his so called debunking of the "hockey stick".
When will deniers learn to be careful what they ask for? Deniers have far more to fear from inquiry than the people who are documenting and theorizing about the observed fact of global warming.
Meanwhile, arctic ice and glaciers around the world keep melting, temperatures keep rising, and sea level also rises.
Got something to say?
Examiner.com is looking for writers, photographers, and videographers to join the fastest growing group of local insiders. If you are interested in growing your online rep apply to be an Examiner today!