US: Researcher on climate is cleared in inquiry

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 behaviour undermined public faith in the science of climate change, the university said last week, writes John M Broder for The New York Times. Dr Michael E Mann has been at the centre of a dispute arising from the unauthorised 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 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 Mann was a significant contributor, have arisen since the hacked e-mail messages surfaced last November. 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.
Full report on The New York Times site