'Climategate' University Exonerated....Again

The third and final inquiry into so-called 'Climategate' has cleared the University of East Anglia (the Uni at the centre of this non-event) of any dishonesty. In other words, claims that the emails hacked from their computers proved that they were fiddling climate change data were wrong. See here for more.

These inquiries have shown Climategate up for what it really is: A cynical, political act designed to scupper any chance that the Copenhagen conference might have had of being a success.

Predictably the climate deniers are already calling "white-wash!" because they didn't get what they wanted from any of these inquiries. There are even plans to kick-off their own inquiry (We can guess the result of that one!). But any reasonable person should believe the findings of 3 independant commitees.

'Climategate': Lot of fuss over nothing

It was no coincidence that the hackers who published loads of e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in an attempt to discredit climate science, did so on the eve of the Copenhagen climate convention. They obviously thought that the e-mails would undermine the science and influence the outcome. It was even dubbed Climategate by the media.

In reality, it had no effect on the convention - which was always headed for failure - and was only seized upon by countries that didn't want emission cuts in the first place e.g. Oil producers.

Since the revelations, however, several investigations have been launched to see if any deception was taking place and to check the methods used to arrive at the claims of global warming.

The results of two of these investigations have already been revealed:

The Commons Science and Technology Committee (A group of UK MPs) decided that there was no case to answer as far as allegations of deception were concerned, and their only criticism was that the University were not responding quickly enough to requests for data from the public (Incidently, much of the data being requested was already in the public domain, so it wasn't as if they were trying to conceal anything).

Then today (14th April), an independant panel investigating the methods used by the University concluded that there had been no malpractice i.e. They weren't fiddling the data.

So, there you go. No deception, no fiddling, no case to answer. In short, a storm in a tea cup.