Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters has an entire category dedicated to climate scientist Michael Mann -- and not because it likes him. Instead, it's filled with attack after attack on Mann; for instance, an April 28 post by Jeff Poor describes him as "a central figure in the Climategate scandal" and "best known for his discredited "hockey stick graph." Noel Sheppard, meanwhile, promoted a parody video built around a misrepresentation of Mann's statement in a stolen "Climategate" email referring to a method to "hide the decline" in certain data. Sheppard also touted how Mann is "being investigated by his University as a result of his involvement in ClimateGate."
Well, that investigation has been completed at the beginning of. What did it find? CBS News' Wyatt Andrews explains:
An internal investigation at Penn State University has cleared meteorology professor Michael Mann of all "climate gate" charges, in which Mann stood accused (both formally and in the blogosphere) of research fraud.
The review cleared Mann of charges that he falsified climate change data, manipulated that data, improperly refused to share his research data and--generally behaved badly by trying to discredit other researchers' work. The panel mildly rebuked Mann for not getting express consent from various researchers before sharing their work -- but that was it.[...]
The most infamous email praises Penn State's Michael Mann of using a research "trick" to "hide the decline." What's that? Basically, scientists who used centuries worth of tree ring data to establish the baseline of global temps in the 20th century, could never explain why those same tree rings started showing a decline in global temps roughly after 1960.
Tree data showing global temps going down didn't mesh with actual recorded temperatures, so pains were taken, (most of the time disclosed, but sometimes not) to use actual temp recordings and "hide the decline" from trees. Sometimes, on the so called hockey stick charts that show global temps as a flat line and then a sharp upward spike are indeed mixing tree ring data and actual temps. Earlier this year the Penn State investigators, like most mainstream scientists, dismissed this part of the fraud charge, finding no "fraud' in the use of actual temp data -- the spiking part of the hockey stick -- which on its own is not in dispute.
You could call this an inside job, of course, and many will, but when a university formally investigates one of its own scientists for fraud, AND releases the report, that's serious.
You'd think that NewsBusters would want to report such serious news to its readers, but no -- more than a week after theMann report was released, NewsBusters has yet to acknowledge its existence.
Oops!
NewsBusters should want to correct the record and admit its attacks were bogus. But so far it won't.
