The academic community is closing ranks around Climategate, the global-warming scandal based around emails revealing corrupted data being peddled by politicized scientists, and the Times, as usual, couldn't be happier.
Reporter Justin Gillis dismissed the accusations of deception and research fraud on the part of pro-global warming scientists (popularly known as Climategate) to be of "little substance" in his slanted Friday story "Penn State Panel Clears Scientist Over 'Climategate.' [1]"
An American scientist accused of manipulating research findings on climate science was cleared of that charge by his university on Thursday, the latest in a string of reports to find little substance in the allegations known as Climategate.
An investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University, weighing the question of whether the scientist, Michael E. Mann, had "seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities," declared that he had not.
Dr. Mann said he was gratified by the findings, the second report from Penn State to clear him. An earlier report had exonerated him of related charges that he suppressed or falsified data, destroyed e-mail and misused confidential information.
The United Nations relied heavily on Mann's data, most infamously his discredited "hockey stick" graph showing drastically rising modern-day temperatures, to back up its alarmist claims about the dangers of human-caused climate change.
The allegations arose after private e-mail messages between Dr. Mann and other scientists were purloined from a computer at the University of East Anglia, in Britain, and posted on the Internet. In one, a British researcher called a data-adjustment procedure Dr. Mann used a "trick."
The e-mail messages led climate-change skeptics to accuse mainstream researchers, including Dr. Mann, of deliberately manipulating the findings of climate science in order to strengthen their case that human activity is causing the earth to warm up.
Gillis provided the minimum rebuttal:
Like the earlier report from Penn State, the new one was assailed Thursday by advocacy groups skeptical of the case for human-induced climate change.
"It's no surprise that it's a whitewash of Dr. Mann's misconduct, because it was designed to be a whitewash," said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington advocacy group. He accused the panel of failing to interview important witnesses.
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