The second of three committees looking into the so-called climategate emails, has issued its report.
This committee, led by Royal Society fellow Ron Oxburgh, was asked by the University of East Angelia to look into the science done at the university's Climate Research Unit (CRU). The committee said in its report that they could find no evidence of malpractice or sloppiness among the data techniques used by the center.
For example, regarding the analysis of tree ring data the committee said.
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.
The committee did recommend that professional statisticians should be used as collaborators in climate research, as a lot of the data analysis is "fundamentally statistical." They also recommended that researchers document the judgmental decisions they make over which data sets to include or exclude, in order "so that the work can in principle be replicated by others."
After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid. In the event CRU scientists were able to give convincing answers to our detailed questions about data choice, data handling and statistical methodology. The Unit freely admits that many data analyses they made in the past are superseded and they would not do things that way today.
One area that the committee did criticize, is how outside groups had reported CRU research, particularly the "over- simplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors."
For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.
The committee also criticized the UK government for requiring payment for freedom of information requests, stating that it went against the current government's policy on openness, and agreed that the owners of raw data should be ones to decide when to release such datasets to the public, not groups such as CRU who use them.
Paul Guinnessy
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