You May Have Missed This

Whilst I was away on vacation (A stop to see mom in Connecticut and then a trip up to Bar Harbor, Maine where there was some wicked good laab-stah every night) I missed reading about yet another exoneration about some never happened scientific misdeads:

Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania climate-change researcher caught in the flap surrounding e-mails hacked from a U.K. university server, was cleared of wrongdoing by an agency that promotes science.

Finding no "evidence of research misconduct," the Arlington, Va.-based National Science Foundation closed its inquiry into Mann, according to an Aug. 15 report from its inspector general. In February, Penn State University, where Mann is a professor of meteorology, exonerated him of suppressing or falsifying data, deleting e-mails and misusing privileged information.

And:

The report confirms findings from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's inspector general and a separate panel of seven scientists based at universities in the U.K., United States and Switzerland.

The original reporting can be found here at Bloomberg.com and you can read the NSF report here. The NSF report says this about those hacked East Anglia emails:

We reviewed the emails and concluded that nothing contained in them evidenced research misconduct within the definition in the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. The University had been provided an extensive volume of emails from the Subject and determined that emails had not been deleted. We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence

On the charge of data falsification the NSF concluded:

There is no specific evidence that the Subject falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct.

But back to the Bloomberg reporting. The interesting part about it is where it was posted: The Tribune-Review.

Perhaps this will be more evidence of how the editorial board doesn't bother reading the news published in the Trib, but this is what Scaife's braintrust said of Mann only last summer:

Speaking about his infamous "hockey stick" global-temperature graph, Mann also told the BBC: "I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate."

Funny, isn't it, how Mann only now objects to Al Gore making his "hockey stick" a household word via "An Inconvenient Truth" -- and to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change making such a big deal of that graph in its reports.

Only now -- after those Climategate e-mails documented improper data manipulation, and after other setbacks for the Church of Climatology's credibility -- does Mann border on 'fessing up. Perhaps his highly questionable "exoneration" by Penn State is loosening his lips.

Better late than never? Of course. But if he'd never warped genuine science to fit his predetermined "conclusions," he'd never have had to even think about, and wouldn't be verging on, full-blown backpedaling.

Given the Trib's news division has actually reported on Mann's exoneration, do you think the editorial braintrust will even bother to do some backpedaling itself?

Yea, me neither.

Good to be home, though.