British Parliament Whitewashes CRU In ClimateGate

British Parliamentary committee charged with investigating the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has issued what amounts to a whitewash.  As I expected last fall, the investigation was cursory at best, and ignores some key issues. 

...in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.


Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

I suspect that the Guardian newspaper who conducted a much more thorough investigation in February will have much more to say on this in the next few weeks...after all, the Labour party, which has strongly supported "climate change" legislation has absolutely no desire for it to be shown as a hoax...or worse a boondoggle.