Drowning in fake whitewash

I don't know why Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin thought she would improve her article Penn State clears Mann in Climate-gate probe by publishing a some unqualified garbage from Myron Ebell, instead of using the space to apologize on behalf of the paper for dangerously misleading its readers for months over a non-scandal which they should have known was wholly unfounded, but I guess we don't have any committees to investigate the misconduct of reporters, do we?

She's lucky. She can publish any old shite made up by the most unreliable sources, such as Myron Ebell, when she must know he lies consistently and is in the private pay of oil and coal interests that do not care if we have a future as a species on this planet or not.

"I'm pleased that the last phase of Penn State's investigation has now been concluded, and that it has cleared me of any wrongdoing. These latest findings should finally put to rest the baseless allegations against me and my research," [Michael Mann] said in a statement.

But the report will likely do little to quell the political debate over climate science, which has only intensified over the past year.

Myron Ebell, a global warming skeptic who directs Energy and Global Warming Policy for the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted that the Penn State ethics review only interviewed one of Mann's critics, MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen.

"It has been designed as a whitewash," said Ebell, whose group accepts contributions from the energy industry. "To admit that Dr. Mann is a conman now would be extremely embarrassing for Penn State. But the scandal will not be contained no matter how many whitewash reports are issued. The evidence of manipulation of data is too obvious and too strong."

In not so many words, Ebell is telling us that he will never shut up about this, no matter what evidence is put before him. That should be enough to rule him out ever again. That and his complaint that a committee of scientific inquiry should call lots of people who are not scientists as witnesses.

As to Lindzen's evidence, his contribution to the report was to say, in response to the information that the first 3 allegations had been dismissed:

It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are the issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on.

When questioned, he agreed that there was nothing irregular about the accessibility and publication of Mann's data. There was and could be no cover up.

The story no one is getting, not this investigation, not Juliet Eilperin's crappy reporting, is that all of these results have been independently replicated with different software and a different set of data.

This is why it is real science, and not a matter of mistake, accident or manipulation. Case closed. You spend all your time discrediting some witness of an event as being unreliable. All of that should fall away if there is a second witness, and a third, and so on. How many more witnesses do we need before you give up?

No amount of evidence will ever shut Myron Ebell up. It is a matter of serious misconduct for a reporter to interview him in this context.