An independent panel of scientists has cleared scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit of the malpractice allegations which have been made against them.
This follows the the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report, which I abstracted in The Mother Of Inquiries: Parliamentary CRU Report.
Response by the University of East Anglia to the Report by Lord Oxburgh’s Science Assessment PanelThe Science Assessment Panel Report is a freely available pdf file.
Wed, 14 Apr 2010
UEA welcomes the Report by the Lord Oxburgh’s Independent Panel, both in respect of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) being cleared of any scientific impropriety and dishonesty, and the suggestions made for improvement in some other areas.
The Oxburgh findings are the result of the latest scrutiny of CRU’s research. The first was the original peer review which led to publication in some of the world’s leading international science journals; the second was the Inquiry by the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee. Taken together, these must represent one of the most searching examinations of any body of scientific research. The veracity of CRU’s research remains intact after this examination.
It is gratifying to us that the Oxburgh Report points out that CRU has done a public service of great value by carrying out meticulous work on temperature records when it was unfashionable and attracted little scientific interest, and that the Unit has been amongst the leaders in international efforts to determine the overall uncertainty in the derived temperature records. Similarly, the Report emphasises that all of CRU’s published research on the global land-based instrumental temperature record included detailed descriptions of uncertainties and appropriate caveats. We also welcome the confirmation that, although some have accused CRU of trying to mislead, the Unit’s published research emphasises the late 20th Century discrepancy between tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature and instrumental observations.
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/oxburgh
The assessment panel comprised:
Chair Prof Ron Oxburgh FRS (Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool)
Prof Huw Davies, ETH Zurich
Prof KerryEmanuel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof Lisa Graumlich, University of Arizona.
Prof David Hand FBA, imperial College. London.
Prof Herbert Huppert FRS. University of Cambridge
Prof Michael Kelly FRS. University of Cambridge
What follows is an abstract from the report.
Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit.
Introduction
1. The Panels was set up by the University in consultation with the Royal Society to assess the integrity of the research published by the Climatic Research Unit in the light of various external assertions. The Unit is a very small academic entity within the School of Environmental Sciences. It has three full time and one part time academic staff members and about a dozen research associates, PhD students and support staff. The essence of the criticism that the Panel was asked to address was that climatic data had been dishonestly selected, manipulated and/or presented to arrive at pre-determined conclusions that were not compatible with a fair interpretation of the original data. ...
2. The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of Ihe Unit's research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data. The Panel worked by examining representative publications by members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University and interviewing and questioning members of Ihe Unit. Not all the panel were present on both occasions but two members were present on both occasions to maintain continuity. About fifteen person/days were spent at the University discussing the Unit's work.
3. The eleven representative publications that tbe Panel considered in detail are listed in Appendix B. The papers cover a period of more than twenty years and were selected on the advice of the Royal Society. All had been published in international scientific journals and had been through a process of peer review. CRU agreed that they were a fair sample of the work of the Unit. The Panel was also free to ask for any other material that it wished and did so. Individuals on the panel asked for and reviewed other CRU research materials.
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Dendroclimatology
2. The main effort of the dendroclimatologists at CRU is in developing ways to extract climate information from networks of tree ring data. The data sets are large and are influenced by many factors of which temperature is only one. This means that the effects of long term temperature variations are masked by other more dominant short term influences and have to be extracted by statistical techniques. The Unit approaches this task with an independent mindset and awareness of the interplay of biological and physical processes underlying the signals that they are trying to detect.
3. Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design, in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose. It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results. The published work also contains many cautions about the limitations of the data and their interpretation.
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Conclusions
We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of me Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As wilh many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that
depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close, collaboration with professional statisticians. Indeed there would be mutual benefit if there were closer collaboration and interaction between CRU and a much wider scientific group outside the relatively small international circle of temperature specialists.
3. It was not the immediate concern of the Panel, bul we observed that there were important and unresolved questions that related to the availability of environmental data sets. lt was pointed out that since UK government adopted a policy that resulted in charging for access to dala sets collected by government agencies, other countries have followed suit impeding the flow of processed and raw data to and between researchers. This is unfortunate and seems inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere in government.
4. A host of important unresolved questions also arises from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context. We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stav with those who collected it.
Submitted to the University 12 April 2010
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