Climate Scientist Cleared by NSF, No Evidence of Misconduct

The National Science Foundation said that they found no evidence of research misconduct from Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann. The climatologist is being simultaneously attacked by climate change skeptics urging him to decrease emission of greenhouse gases.

The closeout memorandum from the Office of the Inspector General of the NSF released the following statement: Although the Subject's data is still available and still the focus of significant critical examination, no direct evidence has been presented that indicates the Subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results. Much of the current debate focuses on the viability of the statistical procedures he employed, the statistics used to confirm the accuracy of the results, and the degree to which one specific set of data impacts the statistical results. These concerns are all appropriate for scientific debate and to assist the research community in directing future research efforts to improve understanding in this field of research.

The NSF added that the concerns lend themselves to scientific debate, not misconduct.

Mann, a professor of meteorology, was exonerated in February by Pennsylvania State University on charges of falsifying data, deleting e-mails, and misusing privileged information.

Climate-change skeptics said that stolen U.K. e-mails are proof that researchers attempted to suppress studies that asked whether our actions and global warming have any relationship.

It was a pretty definitive finding that the charges were unfounded, Mann said in an interview. I was very pleased, he added.

Climate change, a key issue in the Republican presidential nomination, gained national attention last week after a study was released that aliens, seeing us as a threat to intergalactic order, may attack us because of our unwillingness to care for our planet.

Extraterrestrial intelligence could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us. ETI could attack us out of selfishness or out of a more altruistic desire to protect the galaxy from us. We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet, the study explained, adding that Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of Earth's atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth.

There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said. I think we're seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change, he added.