East Anglia University climate scientists cleared by inquiry

London, Apr 15(ANI): An inquiry panel of leading scientists, nominated by the Royal Society, has said the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is involved in the row over stolen e-mails, acted with integrity and made no attempt to manipulate their research on global temperatures.

The CRU has been under attack since hacked e-mails were leaked online last year, which skeptics claimed showed scientists manipulated data to support a theory of manmade global warming.

The panel added that the CRU's research was misrepresented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which failed to reflect uncertainties concerning the raw temperature data.

They also said that the unit might not have used the best methods for analyzing temperature records, and failed to store all its data and keep full records of exactly what it had done, preventing other scientists from checking all its findings.

"We found them to be objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda," The Times Online quoted the panel, as saying.

"Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible," the panel added.

They further said it was "regrettable" that the IPCC, in its advice to governments on climate change, had failed to reflect uncertainties that had been clearly stated in the unit's reports.

"Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors," the panel said.

"For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasise the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue," the panel added.

The panel said the unit's findings would have been more robust if they had worked with experts on interpreting statistics. (ANI)