Review exonerates climate scientists

Russell’s inquiry is the third major British investigation into the theft and dissemination of more than 1,000 e-mails taken from a server at the university.

They caused a sensation when they were published online in November. The stolen correspondence captured researchers speaking in scathing terms about their critics, discussing ways to stonewall skeptics of man-made climate change and talking about how to freeze opponents out of peer-reviewed journals.

Beyond specific allegations of scientific misconduct, the furor over the e-mails fed the notion that, at worst, a closed community of climate scientists was systematically exaggerating the threat of climate change or at least giving skeptics’ arguments the collective cold shoulder.

The scandal destabilized the UN climate change conference at Copenhagen and led to the temporary resignation of Climatic Research Unit director Phil Jones, who stepped down as Russell was brought in to investigate.

The carefully worded report mostly defends the scientists from attacks, saying there is no evidence Jones had destroyed evidence that he knew critics were seeking or that he or others perverted the peer review process.

It also largely excuses the intemperate language that helped make the e-mails such an Internet sensation, saying that the more extreme exchanges — such as when one scientist cheers the death of a skeptic and another jokingly threatens to beat a prominent critic — were typical of often over-the-top electronic missives friends and colleagues trade every day.

But the report does dole out some criticism, saying that Jones clearly pushed others to delete e-mails that he thought might provide ammunition to skeptics, and that the University of East Anglia had been unhelpful in dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests, an issue Britain’s data-protection watchdog has also flagged.

The report also revisits the now infamous e-mail exchange between Jones and a colleague in which the climatologist refers to a “trick’’ used to “hide the decline’’ in a chart used to track global temperatures.

The chart, which shows an alarming temperature spike at the end of the last millennium, became a powerful visual tool in the campaign to control greenhouse gas emissions, gracing the front cover of the World Meteorological Organization’s 1999 report on climate change. Russell said the chart was misleading because it was not explicit enough about the way in which the underlying data had been spliced together.