Climategate whitewashers squirm like maggots on Bishop Hill's pin

Just back from the House of Lords for the launch of the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s report on the failings of the three Climategate inquiries.

The official inquiries, as we know, found nothing untoward in any of the Climategate emails – nor in the behaviour of the scientists responsible for them. But the GWPF’s report, by Andrew “Bishop Hill” Montford, begs to differ. At the conference, one journalist asked Montford to try to summarise the juiciest of his allegations. Montford found this difficult: so many and varied are the failings of the three whitewash inquiries, he simply couldn’t decide which ones to choose.

Here, for example, are just a few criticisms of the Oxburgh whitewash.

The panel appears to have been deliberately selected to have a majority who would not address the review objectively and to exclude sceptical views entirely.

UEA appointed Oxburgh as chairman of the panel in the full knowledge that he had conflicts of interest.

UEA restricted the scope of the Oxburgh inquiry to published papers only, avoiding the serious allegations related to the IPCC activities of CRU staff.

The scope was further restricted to the conduct of the scientists. UEA had led the Science and Technology Committee members to believe that the quality of CRU’s scientific work would be re-assessed. The committee’s chairman, Phil Willis, felt that the UEA had misled them.

Lord Oxburgh’s report misled the public by stating that the papers were chosen ‘on the advice of the Royal Society.’

Lord Rees said that he had consulted with experts about the papers. In fact he had only discussed them with Sir Brian Hoskins, who had said he did not know CRU’s works.

While we’re on Lord Oxburgh, it’s worth reminding ourselves just how entirely unsuited to chairing a supposedly neutral inquiry on AGW this man is. Here’s an interview he gave to Guardian in 2005 in which he reveals why corporate Quislings like himself have so strong an interest in pushing the AGW agenda:

Oxburgh advocates that government uses the controls at its disposal: “Regulate biofuels. Or subsidise. Or tax” – any incentive really, but “what we don’t want to see is in two years’ time the government simply becoming bored with climate change after we’ve invested a lot of our shareholders’ money.”

Perhaps the most shocking new revelation in Andrew Montford’s report is that Sir Muir Russell appears to have been given evidence at the beginning of his inquiry that [paleoclimatologist] Keith Briffa had “taken steps that might be construed as an attempt to block Freedom of Information requests.”

Despite this, the Muir Russell report claimed “we have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete information in respect of a request already made.”

Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser.