Climategate Scientists "Cleared of Dishonest Behavior"

Jillian Bandes | July 08, 2010 8:13 AM

Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, has been cleared of any dishonest behavior after the Climategate email scandal that forced him to leave his post.

The emails that were leaked from his office talked about using a "trick" to interpret date to make it appear that temperatures were rising faster than they actually were. They also referred to the death of one of his scientific opponents — a climate change skeptic — as "cheering news."

The official investigators who cleared Jones complained that he did not comply with information requests as quickly as they would like. But in the end, that didn't matter, according to statements one official made to The Guardian:

Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said...The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt ... We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

The only slap on the wrist came from CRU's controversial 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization, the subject of Jones' "trick" science. Because of creative labeling techniques, the decline in temperature decline was hidden. Notations were made "in the report text" explaining the labeling techniques, but that text didn't make it out to the general public, of course. At least the investigators picked up on that.