Scientist in E-Mail Scandal Largely Cleared By University Inquiry

Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist at the heart of the recent controversy over hacked e-mails, has been largely cleared of wrongdoing by an academic board of inquiry at Pennsylvania State University, where he works. The panel found that Mann did not “participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or falsify data.” Nor, the panel concluded, did he “delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data” relating to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Mann wrote, received, or was mentioned in a third of the 1,000 e-mails stolen from the computer files of a climate research institute at the University of East Anglia. Critics said the e-mails show that scientists conspired to falsify data and to exclude from the IPCC report researchers who questioned global warming. One of Mann’s e-mails received particular attention because he referred to a “trick” employed in a well-known graph he developed showing global temperatures holding steady until a sharp rise in recent decades. The university concluded that the so-called trick was “nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion.” The panel cleared Mann on three of four issues and referred to another committee the question of whether Mann’s conduct deviated from accepted academic practices.