WASHINGTON — An academic board of inquiry has largely cleared a noted Pennsylvania State University climatologist of scientific misconduct, but a second panel will convene to determine whether his behavior undermined public faith in the science of climate change, the university said Wednesday.
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The scientist, Dr. Michael E. Mann, has been at the center of a dispute arising from the unauthorized release of more than 1,000 e-mail messages from the servers of the University of East Anglia in England, home to one of the world’s premier climate research units.
While the Pennsylvania State inquiry, conducted by three senior faculty members and administrators, absolved Dr. Mann of the most serious charges against him, it is not likely to silence the controversy over climate science. New questions about the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to which Dr. Mann was a significant contributor, have arisen since the hacked e-mail messages surfaced last November.
That faculty board did not look into the science of climate change itself, the university said in announcing its results. That, it said, is “a matter more appropriately left to the profession.”
Dr. Mann was named in 377 of the e-mail messages, including several that critics took to suggest that he had manipulated or destroyed data to strengthen his case that human activity was changing the global climate.
In the best-known message, Phil Jones, a climatologist of the University of East Anglia, refers to a “trick” in a graph produced a decade ago showing 1,000 years of essentially steady global surface temperatures followed by a sharp upward spike in the 20th century, seemingly corresponding to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The so-called hockey stick graph has become an icon for environmentalists. It was prominently displayed in a 2001 United Nations report concluding that greenhouse gases from human activities had probably caused most of the warming measured since 1950.
In some of the e-mail messages, Dr. Mann refers to his assembly of data from a number of different sources, including ancient tree rings and earth core samples, as a “trick.” Critics pounced on the term and said it was evidence that Dr. Mann and other scientists had manipulated temperature data to support their conclusions. But the Pennsylvania State inquiry board said the term “trick” was used by scientists and mathematicians to refer to an insight that solves a problem. “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 by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field,” the panel said.
The e-mail messages also contained suggestions that Dr. Mann had hidden or destroyed e-mail messages and other information relating to a United Nations climate change report to prevent other scientists from reviewing them. Dr. Mann produced the material in question, and the Pennsylvania State board cleared him of the charge.
There were also questions about whether Dr. Mann misused confidential data and engaged in a conspiracy with like-minded scientists to withhold information from competing scholars. The board found nothing to support the charge.
Dr. Mann, in an e-mail response to a request for comment, said he was pleased that the panel had found “no evidence of any of the allegations against me.”
“Three of the four allegations have been dismissed completely,” he wrote. “Even though no evidence to substantiate the fourth allegation was found, the University administrators thought it best to convene a separate committee of distinguished scientists to resolve any remaining questions about academic procedures. This is very much the vindication I expected since I am confident I have done nothing wrong.”
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, a skeptic of climate change called for an independent investigation. “We need to reassure the American people that their tax dollars are supporting objective scientific research rather than political agendas,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 8, 2010
An article on Thursday about an academic inquiry that largely cleared a Pennsylvania State University climatologist, Michael E. Mann, of scientific misconduct misattributed an e-mailed comment about a “trick” used in combining temperature data. Phil Jones, a climatologist of the University of East Anglia, sent the e-mail message, not Dr. Mann. (The inquiry board found that Dr. Mann’s use of the data was legitimate and noted that “trick” is a term used by scientists to refer to an insight that solves a problem.)