Sir Muir Russell: "Climategate" still dead; climate 'skeptics' start kangaroo inquiry into inquiries

Sir Muir Russell to global warming 'skeptics': "Climategate" is still dead!

From BBC News: [cached]

Climate scientists at a top UK research unit have emerged from an inquiry with their reputations for honesty intact but with a lack of openness criticised.

The Independent Climate Change Email Review was set up by the University of East Anglia (UEA) after more than 1,000 e-mails were hacked from its servers.

Climate "sceptics" claimed the e-mails showed that UEA scientists manipulated and suppressed key climate data.

But these accusations are largely dismissed by the report. [...]

The review, chaired by former civil servant Sir Muir Russell, has spent months reading submissions sent in by climate scientists and their critics and interviewing key players, notably scientists within the university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

The report itself is available. [cached]

So what happens next?

I had thought that the global warming skeptics inactivists will respond by starting their own kangaroo 'inquiry' into the CRU e-mails. To my surprise, they've gone even farther: (!)

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an influential sceptical think-tank, said that the report was a "damning indictment of the university's handling of freedom of information requests". [...]

"We (the Global Warming Policy Foundation) have now commissioned our own inquiry into the way these three inquiries have been set up and run," he said. "I don't know anyone among the critics who has been swayed by the first two."

In other words, Peiser's GWPF wants to set up their own kangaroo inquiry into the inquiries!

OK; so what else happens next?

Here are a few other things that I think might happen in the next few months:

• Peiser's Citizen Tribunal™ -- complete with formal-sounding procedurese and gravitas and a nice-sounding name such as "Nongovernmental Citizen Review of Climate Change Emails" -- somehow ends up comprising only climate inactivists. They pronounce the people behind all the UK inquiries as being guilty of high treason and other unthinkable crimes. And they find a way to drag US climatologist Michael Mann into it, because they're just obsessed with Mann.
• US Republican politicians and right-wingers start verbally attacking Mann; never mind that the CRU's in the UK.
• Parliament members in the UK, Australia, the US, Canada etc. get spammed incessantly by climate inactivists telling them to beware of Michael Mann, who's of course the fount of Global Warmist Propaganda Coming From the Phantom Soviet Empire.
• Someone 'leaks' some more material from climate scientists just before the Cancún climate change summit. Curiously, the 'leaker' shows an inordinate amount of interest in tree rings and Michael Mann, and manages to make the 'leak' look like a cyber-attack.

So there. Time will tell how much of the above I manage to get correct. :)

* * *

Updates

• SwiftHack
  • 2010-07-08: The Muir Russell report has some tidbits on CRU's computer network situation at the time of the attack.
• Attacks on Michael Mann
  • 2010-07-09: All Hail the Goracle! One of my predictions has come to pass: right-winger Anthony Watts responds to the Muir Russell report by, guess what, attacking Michael Mann. Oh, and Watts just censored freedom'd away our reply to blog commenter Smokey, which is as follows:
    

    Perhaps if you responded to the investigation report by criticizing scientists who are actually in CRU, you might have a point (and even then).
    
    But to go straight to attacking Michael Mann, a scientist who isn’t even in the UK, much less in CRU? What sort of 'logic' lies behind that?
    
    Face it: you’re just obsessed with Michael Mann.

  • 2010-07-10: Deep Climate spots another case of the "Climategate Mann Derangement Syndrome".
  • 2010-07-11: S. Fred Singer is another case of the Mann Derangement Syndrome. [cached]