'Climategate' Professor Gets His Job Back

professor-phil-jonesProfessor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the ‘climategate scandal’, is to be reinstated in his role at the University of East Anglia after being cleared of dishonesty by a major review.

By Louise Gray

Prof Jones lost his job as head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA after personal emails he sent appeared on the internet.

The emails referred to a ‘trick’ used to interpret data and the death of a leading climate change sceptic as “cheering news.”

Sceptics claimed the stolen emails showed Prof Jones and his colleagues were willing to manipulate key data to exaggerate the rise in global temperatures.

The scandal, that became known as ‘climategate’, caused repercussions around the world as it was used by those who question the case for man made global warming.

However a comprehensive review into the case by Sir Muir Russell, a senior UK civil servant, has cleared Prof Jones of dishonest behaviour.

Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the UEA, immediately announced that Prof Jones will be reinstated as Director of Research in CRU, a role of similar importance to his last post.

He said it was a personal vindication for Prof Jones, who has said he considered suicide over the affair.

“We hope this means the wilder assertions about the climate science community will stop,” he said.

However sceptics claimed the report was a whitewash and questioned the reinstatement of Prof Jones.

David Holland, one of the leading sceptics on the blogosphere, pointed out that Prof Jones referred to deleting emails in one of his communications.

“Would you trust a man who has asked to delete evidence?” he said.

Read the rest of this story at The London Telegraph.

23 Responses to 'Climategate' Professor Gets His Job Back

  1. paul wenum July 7, 2010 at 9:45 pm #

    I never trust a person “that deletes the evidence.” Let the truth be known. Talk about a cover-up. Watched Watergate in 1972, Sam Erwin, Baker, et al and actually took vacation to watch it live. Nothing changes other than back then the media took on people like this. Times have obviously changed.

  2. Hal Groar July 11, 2010 at 9:35 pm #

    Can you imagine what he deleted? There has to be a way to get those emails back.

  3. paul wenum July 11, 2010 at 10:52 pm #

    You never will my friend. Delete, delete etc. Reminds me of Rose Woods circa 1972.

  4. Rob N. Hood July 12, 2010 at 1:31 pm #

    WTF?

  5. paul wenum July 12, 2010 at 8:30 pm #

    It’s called a Cover-up Robbie Boy. Pure and simple.

  6. Hal Groar July 12, 2010 at 9:42 pm #

    Yes, but I understand also that you never really delete anything from a computer. You just remove the “address” but it is still in there. There has to be a way to get those back…with permission of course!

  7. paul wenum July 12, 2010 at 10:20 pm #

    Hal, you and I as well as others on this site know that will never happen. In our dreams my friend. We cannot even indict the Black Panthers. Do you believe that we could uncover the “deleted” emails? Liberals never ask permission. Look at the New York Times. I’ve learned that over the last 18 months my friend.

  8. Rob N. Hood July 13, 2010 at 7:24 am #

    The decision not to indict those Black Panthers (there was nothing to indict them on) occurred during the last days of the Bush Administration. Got that? Just another inconvenient FACT.

  9. paul wenum July 13, 2010 at 6:27 pm #

    Voter intimidation on “Election Day” with threats of violence is an indictable offense. Be they white, black or purple. Do you ever read/see? No, blinded by the left wing machine as I “see” it. Finally, NO, we “Don’t get it!”

  10. Rob N. Hood July 14, 2010 at 7:20 am #

    Umm, it must not have been indictable… cuz even the Bush Administration didn’t do it. So… umm… what is it about that don’t you understand?

  11. paul wenum July 14, 2010 at 9:19 pm #

    Duh, they weren’t in office any longer. List one media outlet absent Fox that aired it? Name them. You can’t because they never aired the videos. Gee, wonder why?

  12. Rob N. Hood July 17, 2010 at 9:10 am #

    It occurred during their administration and had nothing to lose at that point to indict them, had it been a true “crime.” They didn’t so that should tell you something. Or not… in your case.

  13. paul wenum July 18, 2010 at 10:05 pm #

    I sense you talk to yourself in the mirror in the morning. Enough said.

  14. Rob N. Hood July 19, 2010 at 7:11 am #

    Your so-called “discourse” is anything but. You respond this way every time you find yourself corrected or in some other factual corner from which you cannot extricate yourself.

    That is mainly why I am done here. Neil is safe to re-join this pathetic hodge podge of misfits in their Quixotic quest for further enslavement.

    See you all in the concentration camp, er I mean re-education camp. That is unless you are all chosen to officially continue dispersing nonsense and gibbersih to keep the sheeple confused and disorganized. I’d hire you for that- you’re pretty good at it, as such things go. May be a future in it for ya.

  15. paul wenum July 21, 2010 at 6:25 pm #

    At the rate this country is going with this administration it may not make any difference what you and I think. Think about it.

  16. Rob N. Hood July 26, 2010 at 8:32 am #

    I had 8 long years to “think about it.” Think about that.

  17. paul wenum July 26, 2010 at 10:00 pm #

    I have and as the sign said “Miss me yet?”

  18. a.n.ditchfield July 30, 2010 at 10:30 am #

    POST POST-NORMAL-SCIENCE?
    a.n.ditchfield
    ______________________________________________________________________________
    Post-Normal-Science claims to be the key to understanding complexity. It is invoked to support the need for a new world order with a different concept of progress.
    What is progress? To most minds it is the increasingly efficient use of energy and materials, capital and labour, that translates into lower costs, better income for all and ultimately to more means for proper care of the environment.
    Not all agree. The bitterness of Green extremists that swept with gale strength at the Copenhagen 2009 conference on climate pointed to the opposite direction: to limiting world economic activity even casting away the fruits of two centuries of the Industrial Revolution that they blame for a global warming that will render the planet uninhabitable. This is a controversial meaning of progress.
    Such scare-mongering is too puny to be compared to the 20th century menaces of Fascism and Communism. Although Green extremists have done some damage, it is still trifling when compared to the destruction brought about by two world wars and the waste of a long cold war.
    Totalitarians had weapons for their mischief while Green extremists can only brandish words that suggest they would have already capsized the planet, were it not for the ballast of common sense possessed by ordinary folk. They promote public policies too disastrous to be tolerated if implemented. The political reality is that the West refuses to be rolled back to an idealised Green agrarian past. Forget China and India.
    Again, the world is divided into two camps. One side of the climate issue is epitomised by MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen, who sees global warming as a political and journalistic phenomenon, not a physical one. He expects future generations to look back in wonder at the turn of the century hysteria about climate. On the other side stands Jerome Ravetz, theorist of the fashionable Post-Normal-Science, who contributed to the uncritical acceptance of anthropogenic global warming as settled science. It is not.
    Ravetz is no common-or-garden Leftist; he holds a Cambridge PhD degree in mathematics. Steeped in Marxism at the Philadelphia home of his Russian/Jewish parents, his US passport was withdrawn during the McCarthy era, although later restored. Disgusted, he adopted UK citizenship. A disgruntled Ravetz is the kind of articulate intellectual that Oxford likes to keep for a while to enliven debate, and certainly fits the role with his Post-Normal-Science. He admits that the scientific method cannot be surpassed in its realm of simple phenomena; he argues that there is another realm with different laws, to deal with complex matters, such as climate, in which the stakes are high and scientific certainties low. Enter the Precautionary Principle: if the cause is just and the science unsettled, uncertainties should not stand in the way of acts of government promoted by official propaganda. Enter the Ministry of Truth…
    The truth is that we don’t know – and may never know – how much of global climate change comes by hand of man or by hand of nature, to what degree and when. We do know that hiding uncertainties for the sake of expediency is at best misleading and at worst fraud, when it abets self-serving politics.
    The uncertainties of complexity are not new; they been around since the time of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. After them, Hegel and Marx believed they had the instruments to navigate on the uncharted waters of complexity in history, politics and economics. Others argue that questions concerning human nature will always remain in the domain of the intuition of statesmen, of the religious, of the mystics, poets and artists who have the feel, not the thought, to discern in matters beyond the reach of reason – and therefore of science. Their intuition cannot be generalised into a soulless ideological system.
    With Post-Normal-Science, Marxists try to bring back, as serious, their Alice in Wonderland thought. Their tactics have changed. They now follow the book of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s. As an exile in Moscow, Gramsci saw the brutal realities of Stalin’s regime and realised the futility of seizing power with revolution and holding onto power with armed force. It led to oppression, not liberty. It is so because Christian societies are entrenched behind a rampart of values upheld for two thousand years; a frontal assault on them is doomed to failure. Gramsci proposed an alternative approach: Marxism should spread in concentric circles until it grows into a consensus. First win over the opinion formers; then the university professors, the intellectuals they educate, the journalists, teachers, leaders of civic and religious organisations, political parties. Finally, with the leadership in the fold, the masses would follow. Marxism would rule with no compulsion, in the place of societies founded on religious values. Christianity is the main opponent of Marxism. Evolution, not revolution, is the way to the ideal classless society, in a long but sure process.
    After Communist regimes collapsed into universal discredit Gramsci’s suave approach gained favour, and in now under way. This was perceived by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, who collected clippings of amusing things written by post-modern (Marxist) thinkers about hard science, especially those who use abstruse mathematical terms to make their text incomprehensible, so as to pass as profound. He grew weary of nonsense written about physics, held by social “scientists” to be white, male and euro-centric. He came to the conclusion that there is no such thing called a social science, because anything goes. He submitted his opinion to experimental proof.
    PROPOSITION
    That a prestigious sociology journal would publish an essay full of absurd statements, provided it was:
    · Well written and of scholarly appearance;
    · Cloaked in the garb of incomprehensible physics;
    · Attuned with prejudices of the editor.
    Sokal’s essay announced his discovery of Quantum Gravity, the synthesis of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, on a superior plane that supersedes both. He suggests he had done it with the methods of social sciences, in a feat that did away with the outworn formal logic and systematic experiment, still in use and unduly so. The implications were so revolutionary that the essay had been rejected for publication in peer-reviewed journals of physics, and this was the reason for its publication in Social Text, known for a mind open to innovation.
    The essay contains nonsense galore immediately perceptible as a joke by an engineering student. The essay favoured mathematics freed from the shackles of the rules of arithmetic and stood against the teaching of the outworn geometry of Euclid, a tool for oppression of the working class. There was anti-feminist prejudice in fluid mechanics. Truth is relative. Constants such as the number pi (3.1416), the speed of light and the constant of gravitation have values attributed by the social context in the current epoch but the values of such constants will change in a future context with a different social setting.
    No absurdity was contrived by Sokal; all were extracted from what was stated by post-modern thinkers about hard science and he supports it with more than one hundred references to published articles.
    PROOF
    Sokal’s essay, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity was indeed published as submitted, with no comment, although Sokal repeatedly asked whether there were any questions to be clarified.
    “Social Text” #46/47, pp. 217-252 (1996).
    QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM
    In another journal, at the time of publication, Sokal explained what he had done at Social Text and regretted that a silent tide of irrationality threatened institutions of higher learning to dictate, from a blind and intolerant pulpit, what is right to do, say and think.
    An inquiring mind shuns Gospel according to St. Marx. Critical reviewers at Social Text could have asked: if a future society decrees that pi = 4 would circles become squares and heavenly bodies cubes? None did.
    With its pretence of a short cut in dealing with complexity, Post-Normal-Science amounts to sophistry of the kind lampooned by Sokal. Its previous failure was in economics and the new one in climate. It is a grab for power to ration use of energy and thus control the lives of every human being in the world. Its followers are not above deceit to exploit emotions of a guilt-ridden West.
    A confident West had worked wonders. The contributions of France to mathematics are expressed in the work of Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, D’Alembert, Delambre, Fourier, Lagrange, Monge, Poisson, Laplace, Cauchy, Galois, Poincaré, Benoit Mandelbrot. Then came French Post-modernists with the thought of Lewis Carroll characters: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”. It leads to proficiency in: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, Derision. A Post Post-Normal-Science is unneeded to dialectically supplant the Post-Normal-Science of Ravetz; a return to Science would do.
    Sokal’s essay is available on Internet at: .

    • Dan McGrath August 2, 2010 at 10:51 am #

      Please be more concise when posting comments.

  19. Rob N. Hood August 1, 2010 at 8:08 am #

    You would.

    “Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident,” he writes, “nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.

    “… The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.”

  20. paul wenum August 1, 2010 at 7:55 pm #

    What?

  21. paul wenum August 4, 2010 at 10:06 pm #

    Still trying to comprehend what I read.

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