Climategate correspondent Michael Mann has published an editorial in the Washington Post.

As a CA reader observed in another thread, the more interesting aspect of the editorial is the overwhelming opposition to Mann’s editorial in the comment thread. Readers were not distracted by Mann’s efforts to deflect attention to Sarah Palin.

Mann’s editorial commences in Nixonian style:

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university.

Readers were quick to observe the inconsistency with Mann’s response to Phil Jones’ request to delete emails (see Climategate here).

Two days after CRU received an FOI request for AR4 comments sent to Briffa that had not been included in the IPCC archive of Review Comments (IPCC procedures adopted by its member governments require it to be “open and transparent” and to archive all review comments for 5 years), Phil Jones sent Mann an email headed “IPCC & FOI” asking him to delete any emails that he may have had with Briffa regarding AR4 and to contact Gene [Wahl, then at Alfred University, currently of NCAR] to do likewise, saying that they would contact Caspar [Ammann of NCAR] to delete his emails.

Jones:

Subject: Re: IPCC & FOI Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. … [unrelated]..

Cheers

Phil

Instead of replying in forceful terms that he did not “condone” such a request and urging other parties not to do so as well, Mann immediately replied to Jones that he would “contact Gene [Wahl] about this ASAP”.

Hi Phil, [… unrelated] I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx talk to you later, mike

Mann says about this:

Some statements in the stolen e-mails reflect poor judgment — for example, a colleague referring to deleting e-mails that might be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request — but there is no evidence that this happened.

This is, of course, untrue. Evidence of deletion of emails that might be subject to a FOI rquest is in a later email, in which Jones says

About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.

In addition, while the Climategate emails are extensive and still being assimilated, they are by no means complete. In many cases, the curtain goes up for a day or two and we don’t see the end of the story. Investigations at the University of East Anglia and Penn State have been authorized.



