A big setback for the Michael Mann smear campaign.
Here‘s the science relevance context, the subject area Mann has worked on, temps in the 1000 year timescale. While some others work on instrumental records, say last 100 or 200 years, some work on ice age stuff that takes 100,000 years etc etc. Some of the 1000 year reconstruction papers were by him, and hence the lines in that IPCC graph labelled MBH1999 and MJ2003 and I don’t know if he’s the M in some other too.
But he hasn’t also worked, at least to my knowledge on other stuff like radiative forcing. Notice how nicely the report is laid online, for everyone to read, hint hint…
The report says
“At the time of initiation of the inquiry, and in the ensuing days during the inquiry, no formal
allegations accusing Dr. Mann of research misconduct were submitted to any University official.”
Prediction: Denialists/Skeptics will say they were not informed of the inquiry, and will demand a renquiry, in which they will formally present their allegations.
Prediction: The press will bury this report, rather than look sheepish. How can they square it with the brouhaha they were reporting? “No allegations of misconduct were formally made”, yet many newstories and opinion articles repeating vague, conspiratorial allegations? The “trick to hide the decline”, a subject upon which countless column inches were wasted by press: the report demolishes those musings. How’s the press going to explain that?
Prediction: skeptics will say it is a whitewash. Were there no commited alternative-to-the-consensus scientists on the panel? They’ll say it is academics sticking up for one another.
Yeah, they have definitely said it’s a whitewash, because “Mann brought so much funding to the university” or some such.