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Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

Kilo_302 said:
.....motherjones.com........
Yep, I always go to Mother Jones for my peer-reviewed scientific discourse....

.....much like, if I'm looking for nuanced, insightful commentary on international situations, I turn to Faux Fox News.    :not-again:
 
George Wallace said:
I have several crap computers.  I prefer to believe the thermometer.

In the context that your thermometer that you put beside your house in a small town 100 years ago, and the one that's now surrounded by a million people and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of asphalt and combustion engines/other heating elements are in no way suitable for direct comparison which is what most of the temperature records currently trumpeted by the alarmists, do not adequately adjust for....


Matthew.  ;)
 
This is going to leave a mark in a lot of family budgets. Have to,feel sorry for Ontario rate payers

"Solar energy – one of the key pillars of the Green Energy and Economy Act (GEEA) – is casting a dark cloud over Ontario electricity bills and is a big factor in recent and future bill increases. In 2013, solar projects caused electricity bills to be about $550-million higher than they would otherwise have been. For a typical homeowner, this works out to $47 per year. Ontario will have an estimated 1,100 MW of solar installed by year-end and roughly 900 MW will be added in 2014. This addition will cause 2014 electricity bills to increase by another $435-million – equal to a typical homeowner increase of $37 per year. By the end of 2014, solar will be costing Ontarians $1.25-billion per year – while generating a paltry 2% of Ontario’s total electricity requirement.

How did Ontario get here?"


http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/10/29/blame-solar-for-sky-high-ontario-power-bills/



 
Haletown said:
How did Ontario get here?"

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/10/29/blame-solar-for-sky-high-ontario-power-bills/

A stupid government; a stupid power authority; a stupid electorate that keeps voting in advocates of "green energy projects" without considering the consequences; and a well oiled industry that can recognize and take advantage of a cash cow when they see it.

:cheers:
 
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) responds to the IPCC report. While I'm sure we will be hearing from the usual suspects about "oh, they're funded by "x" so it does not count", it is worth looking at because most of the methodology is open. Counteraguments about the sources of funding for the IPCC or who benefits from its creation, funding and recommendations can also be made, but for now I suggest people just read and absorb what is being said:

http://heartland.org/sites/default/files/critique_of_ipcc_spm.pdf
 
Might be time to invest in some good coats and a wood stove. Despite the Church of AGW para at the end, a "Little Ice Age" is to be feared; during the last one it was cold enough to freeze rivers in Noth America and Europe hard enough to cross with heavy wagons and artillery (ask Charles X of Sweden or George Washington), and of course growing seasons were shortened quite a bit as well. This is far more than "just offsetting greenhouse warming", and the implications for transportation and our ability to grow food at low cost and eat is pretty immense:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|space#.UnZSmxxrkmt

Solar activity heads for lowest low in four centuries

The sun's activity is in free fall, according to a leading space physicist. But don't expect a little ice age. "Solar activity is declining very fast at the moment," Mike Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at Reading University, UK, told New Scientist. "We estimate faster than at any time in the last 9300 years."

Lockwood and his colleagues are reassessing the chances of this decline continuing over decades to become the first "grand solar minimum" for four centuries. During a grand minimum the normal 11-year solar cycle is suppressed and the sun has virtually no sunspots for several decades. This summer should have seen a peak in the number of sunspots, but it didn't happen.

Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 per cent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 per cent (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2011JD017013).

Little ice age

The Maunder Minimum coincided with the worst European winters of the little ice age, a period lasting centuries when several regions around the globe experienced unusual cooling. Tree ring studies suggest it cooled the northern hemisphere by up to 0.4 °C.

But Lockwood says we should not expect a new grand minimum to bring on a new little ice age. Human-induced global warming, he says, is already a more important force in global temperatures than even major solar cycles. Temperatures have risen by 0.85 °C since 1880, with more expected, according to the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

There may still be noticeable consequences. For instance, long term cold winters in the UK are common when solar activity is low. And less solar activity can slow the jet stream, triggering a suite of interlinked extreme weather events like the Russian heatwave of 2010, and the devastating floods in Pakistan that same year.

Isotope trail

There have been 24 grand solar minima in the past 10,000 years. Their history is reconstructed by looking for isotopes like carbon-14 that cosmic rays generate in the atmosphere. Solar activity boosts the solar wind which deflects cosmic rays coming at Earth, so less solar activity means more cosmic rays and more of these isotopes.

How the isotopes vary over time can be measured by looking at things like tree rings, which absorb carbon-14, or ice cores, which accumulate beryllium-10.

The current long-term decline in solar activity set in after the last grand solar maximum peaked in 1956, says Lockwood. The decline has accelerated recently, and the absence of sunspots this summer has set alarm bells ringing.

The precise extent to which solar cycles influence global temperatures is still debated, including whether the recent decline may have helped cause the current hiatus in the pace of global warming.

"Mike is probably right that there is a chance of the sun returning to a level of activity similar to the Maunder Minimum," says atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh of Imperial College. But she adds: "Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age."

It is more likely that it will simply reduce the warming a little, and set us up for greater warming if it receded.
 
I liked the article.

I agreed with many points. I have not been a fan of wind turbines. They list all the reasons in that article for the most part except in addition to the bird/bug/bat life they mess up they are plain old ugly.

I partially agree with solar. I have bought some solar cells and run them to assist some of my equipment (its nice in the summer to keep cows contained with solar powered 9,000 volts of ouch). I am not happy about the clean up of previous plants and I do not support out sourcing.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Burning fossil fuel only amounts to a tiny blip of the atmospheric carbon. I agree we are ok to use fossil fuels for the time being (like our life time) but there exist the oppurtunity in future generations to come up with better alternatives. I am sure my grandkids will be old themselves by the time this gets going. My biggest issue is poorly thought out agriculture policies and practices and idiotic beliefs. This has led to huge carbon loss to the atmosphere.

Side note, vegans, your contributing more harm to the evironment than helping.

Eat more beef and save the environment! Rotational pasture raised beef/lamb/goat that is!
 
Hear hear!

While I have a philosophical attachment to the idea of photovoltaics (no moving parts, no need to connect to the grid), the current reality is they are too expensive, too inefficient and (given how they are actually made) too "dirty" to be a useful alternative to the grid right now, except in niche applications.

There is lots of R&D going on all over the world, so perhaps both Rick and I will be happy sooner or later when something better finally makes it out of the lab and into the market. Of course, we can also take comfort in the fact that the United States is poised to become the number one global producer of oil, natural gas liquids and natural gas in 2014, so our economies can continue to be powered by relatively inexpensive energy, and other nations hungry for energy resources will be able to meet most of their needs as well (leading to a possibility of a more peaceful future).
 
Well I suppose if you can invent the Hockey Stick, you can invent a consensus.

"How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 – that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.

To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken – those 2500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.

The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout — “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change.  The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout."


http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/30/lawrence-solomon-75-climate-scientists-think-humans-contribute-to-global-warming/



The global environmental industry  . . . So trustworthy.
 
Totally amazing infographic on climate history, but the graph looks nothing like a "hockey stick", more like a mountain range. Since the graphic is too large to post, follow this link: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/younger_dryas_to_present_time_line1.png

and for some commentary about the intrpretation of the graph, this blogger makes a very good point:

http://www.barrelstrength.com/2013/11/19/essential-climate-data/

I do not want any person concerned with global warming, of the natural or human variety, to discuss the issue without at least pondering this vastly informative graph for at least ten minutes. It affords a rare and cheap education.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/younger_dryas_to_present_time_line1.png

Note especially the little coloured insert near the top. Atmospheric CO2 has been sharply declining since the age of the dinosaurs, from about the middle Jurassic period onward, from about 2,750 parts per million to about 300 parts per million. Average global temperature has dropped from a balmy 25 degrees Centigrade about 50 million years ago to about 10C today. The temperature drop began around 100 million years after the drop in atmospheric CO2. That is some lag time!

I am not saying this is the complete or final picture of atmospheric or temperature changes over time. Rather, I am saying that it successfully shows
the immensity of time over which the planet has been changing from one dominated by CO2 in the atmosphere to one where CO2 is a trace element;
the irrelevance of man to most of this picture; and the possible relevance of human-produced CO2 to the latest warm period, post 1860. Note the sharp upswing in average global temperature post-1980 (see bottom right inset into chart).
 
I guess the 95% confidence that global warming is caused by humans is going to need a bit of revision (thet 5% seems to be overpowering everything else). Follow the link to see the pictures of sea ice coverage:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/And-global-COOLING-Return-Arctic-ice-cap-grows-29-year.html#ixzz2mHK3wtC0

And now it's global COOLING! Return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 29% in a year
533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012
BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013
Publication of UN climate change report suggesting global warming caused by humans pushed back to later this month
By David Rose
PUBLISHED: 23:37 GMT, 7 September 2013 | UPDATED: 18:45 GMT, 28 September 2013

A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 29 per cent.

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

HOW NSIDC GOT ITS FIGURES WRONG AND THEN KEPT QUIET
Since publication of the original version of this article, the US source of the figures – the NASA-funded National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) - was discovered to have made a huge error and then quietly corrected the figure without mentioning it.
On September 4, NSIDC, based at the University of Colorado, stated on its website that in August 2013 the Arctic ice cover recovered by a record 2.38 million sq km – 919,000 sq miles – from its 2012 low.

News of this figure was widely reported – including by Mailonline - on September 8. But on September 10, the NSIDC quietly changed it to 1.38 million sq km (533,000 sq miles) – and replaced the original document so the old figure no longer shows up on a main Google search. It can now only be found on an old ‘cached’ page.

The figures in this article have now been corrected.

Prompted by an inquiry from ‘green’ blogger Bob Ward, the NSIDC’s spokeswoman Natasha Vizcarra said the mistake was a ‘typographical error’, telling him: ‘There are no plans to make a statement on the change because it was not an error in the data.’ .



The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

The continuing furore caused by The Mail on Sunday’s revelations – which will now be amplified by the return of the Arctic ice sheet – has forced the UN’s climate change body to reconsider its position.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was due in October to start publishing its Fifth Assessment Report – a huge three-volume study issued every six or seven years. It will hold a pre-summit in Stockholm later this month.

THERE WON'T BE ANY ICE AT ALL! HOW THE BBC PREDICTED CHAOS IN 2007
Only six years ago, the BBC reported that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2013, citing a scientist in the US who claimed this was a ‘conservative’ forecast. Perhaps it was their confidence that led more than 20 yachts to try to sail the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to  the Pacific this summer. As of last week, all these vessels were stuck in the ice, some at the eastern end of the passage in Prince Regent Inlet, others further west at Cape Bathurst.

Shipping experts said the only way these vessels were likely to be freed was by the icebreakers of the Canadian coastguard. According to the official Canadian government website, the Northwest Passage has remained ice-bound and impassable  all summer.

The BBC’s 2007 report quoted scientist  Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, who based his views on super-computer models and the fact that ‘we use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice’.

He was confident his results were ‘much more realistic’ than other projections, which ‘underestimate the amount of heat delivered to the sea ice’. Also quoted was Cambridge University expert Professor Peter Wadhams. He backed Professor Maslowski, saying his model was ‘more efficient’ than others because it ‘takes account of processes that happen internally in the ice’.
He added: ‘This is not a cycle; not just a fluctuation. In the end, it will all just melt away quite suddenly.’
..
Leaked documents show that governments which support and finance the IPCC are demanding more than 1,500 changes to the report’s ‘summary for policymakers’. They say its current draft does not properly explain the pause.

At the heart of the row lie two questions: the extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels, as well as how much of the warming over the past 150 years – so far, just 0.8C – is down to human greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural variability.

In its draft report, the IPCC says it is ‘95 per cent confident’ that global warming has been caused by humans – up from 90 per cent in 2007.

This claim is already hotly disputed. US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger. It’s now clear the models are way too sensitive to carbon dioxide. I cannot see any basis for the IPCC increasing its confidence level.’

She pointed to long-term cycles  in ocean temperature, which have a huge influence on climate and  suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. This led some scientists at the time to forecast an imminent ice age.

Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, was one of the first to investigate the ocean cycles. He said: ‘We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.

‘The IPCC claims its models show a pause of 15 years can be expected. But that means that after only a very few years more, they will have to admit they are wrong.’

Others are more cautious. Dr Ed Hawkins, of Reading University, drew the graph published by The Mail on Sunday in March showing how far world temperatures have diverged from computer predictions. He admitted the cycles may have caused some of the recorded warming, but insisted that natural variability alone could not explain all of the temperature rise over the past 150 years.

Nonetheless, the belief that summer Arctic ice is about to disappear remains an IPCC tenet, frequently flung in the face of critics who point to the pause.

Yet there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. Data uncovered by climate historians show that there was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by intense re-freezes that ended only in 1979 – the year the IPCC says that shrinking began.
Professor Curry said the ice’s behaviour over the next five years would be crucial, both for understanding the climate and for future policy. ‘Arctic sea ice is the indicator to watch,’ she said.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/And-global-COOLING-Return-Arctic-ice-cap-grows-29-year.html#ixzz2mLCF3JXD
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
 
The Global Warming freaks can just bite me!

You can't imagine how pissed off disappointed I am that their doom and gloom just isn't coming to pass.  >:(


1stSnow_zps58261a44.jpg
 
Thucydides said:
Totally amazing infographic on climate history, but the graph looks nothing like a "hockey stick", more like a mountain range.

Kinda looks like .........nature..... occurring randomly.
 
Great Lakes covered in ice. A rather amazing picture on the link:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-covered-great-lakes-seen-from-space/

Ice-covered Great Lakes seen from space

This NASA satellite photo shows the Great Lakes, 80.3 percent covered by ice.  NASA

A deep freeze has settled in over the Great Lakes this winter and a new image released by NASA shows the astonishing extent of the ice cover as seen from space.

NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of the lakes on the early afternoon of Feb. 19, 2014. At the time, 80.3 percent of the five lakes were covered in ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Earlier this month, ice cover over the Great Lakes hit 88 percent for the first time since 1994. Typically at its peak, the average ice cover is just over 50 percent, and it only occasionally passes 80 percent, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit]

Cold temperatures that have persisted in the region are largely responsible for this year's thick layer of ice, but cryospheric scientist Nathan Kurtz, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told the Earth Observatory that "secondary factors like clouds, snow and wind also play a role." And some lakes are more frozen than others. While the ice cover over Lake Erie, Lake Superior and Lake Huron is approaching 100 percent, Lake Ontario is only around 20 percent frozen and Lake Michigan is about 60 percent covered, according to the latest update from GLERL.

NASA researchers also put together a false-color image combining shortwave infrared, near infrared and red wavelengths to pick out ice from other elements that look white in visible-wavelength images like snow, water and clouds. In this image, ice appears pale blue, and the thicker it is the brighter it looks. Open water, meanwhile, is shown in navy, snow is blue-green and clouds appear either white or blue-green, according the Earth Observatory.

The ice could have environmental effects on the surrounding region.

"The biggest impact we'll see is shutting down the lake-effect snow," Guy Meadows, director of Michigan Technological University's Great Lakes Research Center, explained in a statement. This "lake-effect" snow usually gets dumped on the region when weather systems from the north and west pick up evaporating lake water. The ice cover is reducing evaporation, but that could be a good thing for the Great Lakes, which experienced record low water levels last year.

In another plus, the ice is thick enough over Lake Superior for visitors to reach the Apostle Islands' ice caves for the first time since 2009. And Meadows said the ice could also protect the spawning beds of whitefish and some other fish species from winter storms.
 
One of the biggest promotors of the Global Warming alarmism is now under "discovery" in a court case against no less than Mark Styen. The discovery has already "discovered" Michael Mann's defines team has doctored a record entered in the defence, (which may not be too surprising given the past activities of the defendant), but this article also reveals in a few simple lines the reason that the Global Warming scam has gone on so long. It would be quite a satisfactory ending if the institution that employed Dr Mann was also forced to return all the money that had been given under false pretences (although that outcome is not really likely):

http://www.steynonline.com/6111/rigor-mortis

Rigor Mortis
by Mark Steyn
February 22, 2014

Thanks to everyone who's contacted me since I decided to countersue Michael Mann. That's the main reason I didn't set up a formal "legal defense fund" or "legal defence fund" (as we'll come to in a moment). Because I'm going on legal offense against an abusive litigant. (If you'd like to be a part of the pushback, please consider supporting me by buying a SteynOnline gift certificate: They never expire, so when my new book comes out later this year you won't have to rummage down the back of the sofa for the loose change.)

As to the difference between "defense" and "defence", Steve McIntyre continues his examinations of Dr Mann's false claims to have been "exonerated" by various investigations and inquiries. As Steve has said, these claims are as false as his claim to be a Nobel Laureate, which he made in the original complaint. Dr Mann's argument is essentially an appeal to authority (look what all these prestigious sounding bodies say about me!), but in fact it's far worse than that: it's a dishonest appeal to authority.

Steve McIntyre looked at the Oxburgh findings on Climategate a few days ago. Now he turns his attention to the inquiry by Muir Russell. For all the airy claims by Dr Mann that he's been exonerated around the planet, in his court pleadings he rarely cites any actual words from these reports to support his claim. He did, however, do so on page 20 of his Plaintiff's Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Defendants National Review and Mark Steyn's Motion to Dismiss. What he quoted, with respect to the Russell report, is this:

Three months later, the University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report, prepared under the oversight of Sir Muir Russell. The report examined whether manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that "the scientists' rigor and honesty are not in doubt. [38 – Muir Russell Report]"

What with computers and Internet and PDFs and so forth, these days when you're writing something and wish to quote from another document you usually just press "copy" and then "paste". Steve McIntyre noticed that the quote said "rigor" as opposed to "rigour", which is how Sir Muir would spell it. So it couldn't have been pasted from the actual report. So he went back and looked at the original quote:

8. The Review examines the honesty, rigour and openness with which the CRU scientists have acted… On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

Mann and his lawyers doctored a quote and put their own version of it in direct quotation marks. That's bad enough. But they did it for a specific reason. Because the original makes clear that Sir Muir's findings apply only to the "CRU scientists" - that's to say, employees of the University of East Anglia, who are the only people the Russell panel was charged with investigating, and were therefore the only people it was in a position to exonerate. So, as evidence of Michael Mann's "exoneration", the best his lawyers can come up with is a fake quote from a report exonerating some people he happens to be acquainted with.

Dr Mann has played fast and loose with details all his professional life, starting from his original "innocent" errors on the hockey stick to his "innocent" promotion of himself as a Nobel Prize winner to his "innocent" misrepresentations of these investigations in his current legal complaint. All these "innocent" mistakes should put to rest at least one thing. It will be for a jury to decide whether he is merely careless or fraudulent, but rigour, or rigor, or any other spelling thereof, is something he knows not.

As to the actual investigation into Mann himself, Louis Lombardi, an attorney and newspaper columnist in Pennsylvania's Happy Valley, very kindly sent me the column he wrote for The Centre Daily Times after the supposed investigation of Mann by Penn State. It seems to have disappeared offline at the paper itself, but the entire piece is archived here:

Here in Happy Valley, Penn State University has just concluded its investigation into allegations against climate-change scientist Michael Mann...

Penn State cleared Doctor Mann of any wrong doing. Now, this investigation may be correct in its conclusion but we really do not know as the University was in no position to investigate one of its own or, stated differently, investigate itself.

Doctor Mann over the years has brought in millions of dollars for the University through his research. For the University to come to any other conclusion than that he acted appropriately would be an admission that the University has been fleecing those who gave the money. How would such an admission affect not only future funding but also repaying funds already received? Thus, it is quite apparent what a predicament the University was in and why the University could not investigate Doctor Mann – as it was really investigating itself.

The conflict of interest is so apparent that one wonders why the University even bothered to produce this report... Penn State for all its wisdom surely knew of this conflict and the appropriate remedy - yet decided to do its own investigation instead of hiring an outside agency. This leaves us with one question – Why?

Quite. To take the other university at the center of the Climategate controversy, the University of East Anglia's investigation was also something of a dodge, but they at least understood the question of "conflict of interest". So they asked an outsider, Lord Oxburgh, to chair the investigation, and he in turn presided over an all-outsider panel from Cambridge, London, Zurich and MIT. Penn State, under its corrupt president (now under criminal indictment), appointed a colleague of Dr Mann's to investigate Dr Mann. And it all worked out swimmingly.

It will not go so well in court.
 
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