The Penn State Collegian archive once again is first on a story, breaking the news that the Penn State Inquiry has finished its inquiry and that results will be available later this week. They report:

Penn State President Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22. “I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.

They didn’t contact me. The only inquiry that has contacted me so far has been an anti-terrorism officer seconded to the Norfolk Police who interviewed me about FOI requests and my views on climate change. Nor have any CA readers notified me that they’ve been contacted by the Penn State inquiry. I wonder who they interviewed. I wonder what they meant about “looking at issues from all sides”.

I’ll be looking for both how they address issues arising out of Climategate and issues that Cicerone kept out of the 2006 NAS inquiry:

– whether Mann was justified in providing results (and code) that contain “dirty laundry” only to “trusted colleagues” and not to potential critics. (The example, of course, being Mann’s provision of residuals to Osborn and Briffa, while refusing them to me.)

– the failure to report adverse verification r2 results for early steps in MBH (while reporting favorable results for later steps), and a consideration of the associated IPCC TAR comment;

– claims that MBH98 results were “robust” to the presence/absence of all dendroclimatic indicators when they were not robust to presence/absence of bristlecones;

– failure to display principal components from the “Censored” directory;

– the unique extension of the Gaspe tree ring series from 1404 to 1400;

– whether the retention of 5 principal components in an effort to salvage MBH results was, as Wegman observed, “of no statistical integrity”.

A few other topics will undoubtedly occur to me when I read the report.



