New 'Climategate' inquiry mostly vindicates scientists

LONDON — Climate-change researchers at a British university failed to respond to critics in an open manner but hewed to high standards in their science and did not manipulate their data, according to findings released Wednesday of an independent review of hundreds of hacked e-mails.

The new report is the last of five investigations of leading British and U.S. climate researchers, prompted by the release of a cache of e-mails that cast doubt on their conduct and raised fresh public controversy over the science of climate change.

All five investigations have come down largely on the side of the climate researchers, rejecting a slew of criticisms raised by climate-change skeptics.

The researcher at the center of the flap was Phil Jones, a leading climatologist who had headed the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England. He had stepped down temporarily pending results of the inquiry but was reinstated Wednesday to a job resembling his old one.

The university solicited and paid for the new report, which climate skeptics assailed.

"This is another example of the establishment circling the wagons and defending their position," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and climate-change policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in Washington.

The e-mails were taken from the server of the University of East Anglia last year and caused an international stir just before an international environment summit in Copenhagen. Skeptics of human-caused climate change said the e-mails showed scientists deliberately trying to suppress certain data about global warming or slanting it to support their conclusions.

But the outside review rejected those claims Wednesday. The report said that, despite some injudicious comments about skeptics, the scientists' "honesty and rigor" were "not in doubt." It also dismissed accusations of data-tampering, saying there was no "evidence of behavior that might undermine the conclusions" of human-caused climate change.

At the same time, the review committee chastised the university's Climatic Research Unit for reacting unprofessionally to criticism by dragging its feet in sharing its data and in responding to freedom-of-information requests.

"There has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness," on the part of the scientists and the university as an institution, said the committee, which was headed by Muir Russell, a former civil servant.

The conclusions echoed the findings of two previous independent investigations into the affair that came to be known as "Climategate." Those inquiries, by the British Parliament and by another university-sponsored panel, also found the science to be sound, if not the researchers' sloppy record-keeping and defensive response to criticism.

Last week, the second of two reviews at Pennsylvania State University exonerated Michael Mann, a scientist there who was also a focus of the controversy.

The e-mails caused a sensation when they were hacked and published in November. Skeptics cited them as proof that scientists had willfully misinterpreted data and exaggerated the effects of global warming.

The scandal has been blamed for fueling the lukewarm commitments by various nations at December's summit to combat climate change and for a drop in public acceptance of the international scientific consensus that such change is caused by human activity.

One e-mail that became emblematic of the debate spoke of using a "trick" to hide an apparent decline in recent global temperatures. The author of the e-mail was Jones.

The new report said the figures supplied by Jones to a meteorological publication were indeed "misleading" and should have been more fully explained, but were not part of a malicious cover-up attempt.

Material from The New York Times is included in this report.