A Penn State panel has cleared hockey-stick hooligan Michael Mann, as a matter of course, of any wrongdoing in the leaked Climategate e-mails.
WaPo reports:
A Pennsylvania State University investigative committee has cleared a climate scientist of ethical misconduct in connection with an exchange of e-mails about global warming known as Climate-gate.
Michael Mann, a meteorology professor at Penn State, came under fire after hackers broke into the server of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Britain and published thousands of e-mails and documents the center’s staff had sent to other climate researchers.
Mann is best known as the author of the “hockey-stick” graph, which showed there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth’s temperature. His work has long been under attack by global-warming skeptics, but the criticism became more heated after an e-mail between scientists referring to a statistical “trick” used in Mann’s research surfaced among the leaked e-mails. Mann said the e-mail was taken out of context.
The Penn State panel, which launched its probe on Nov. 30 but subsequently narrowed it to examine only if Mann “seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” On Thursday it concluded that he had not.
While the panel called Mann’s decision to share “unpublished manuscripts with third parties, without first having received express consent from the authors of such manuscripts… careless and inappropriate,” it unanimously concluded “that there is no substance to the allegation” that Mann engaged in academic misconduct.
Mann welcomed the panel’s findings.
No doubt.