Well, this should be interesting, if possibly useless:

But a spokesperson said information about the investigation into the hack at UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) would be made public very soon.

Scientists will be scrutinising the choice of chair and the terms of reference.
One senior climate scientist told me that the chair would have to be a person accepted by both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics as a highly respected figure without strong connections to either group.

If they can find a decently independent group with a strong charter to go where the evidence leads them, then UAE could very well distance itself from the mess. But it has to be clear that this investigation:

1. Focus on the illegal efforts to avoid FOI requests and incite others to also partake in such  illegal acts.
2. Focus on the effort to distort the peer-review process to the point of persecuting opposition views and apply pressure on organizations to censor opposition views.
3. Focus on the low quality of data and code and determine if any solid conclusions worth a penny could be derived from the CRU ‘tools’.
4. Focus on whether legitimate raw data was rejected or removed or overwritten with the result of increasing any recent warming trends or squelching any past warming trends (regardless of the reason the data was left out of the results).

If a serious, independent group with authority to go where they want to is established then UAE may be able to keep its well earned reputation.

BBC News understands that senior individuals at UEA have acknowledged the potential damage to the university’s reputation from the CRU affair and are anxious to clear the institution’s name.

This will be priority one for all organizations and colleagues of those implicated in the CRU emails. They will soon realize there are limits to what they can demand of others in their zealotry. I get the feeling there are lots of people talking already behind the scenes.

Tags: CRU, Global Warming, Investigation, UAE