Independent Climate Email Probe Vindicates Scientists

The University of East Anglia commissioned an independent review of the Swifthack stolen emails & now the final results (PDF) are in. The conclusion?

We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.

Over at Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard closes the book, deciding “climategate” is now “officially a fake scandal.”

And at the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin writes, “One lesson is that anyone hoping to up-end decades of research pointing to a growing human influence on the climate by challenging a single batch of studies (in this case efforts to chart past temperatures using indirect clues like tree rings) is almost surely on a fool’s errand.”

Photo via Flickr’s cokeeorg