A Pithy Comment on the Russell Report from Kevin Trenberth. (July 8, 2010)

Kevin Trenberth is head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He was a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change.

Following yesterday's publication of the review chaired by Sir Muir Russell, The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review, Dr Trenberth emailed the following comments to ScienceInsider:

1) A lot of the review is predictable and not unexpected.

2) Don't you think it strange that the review did not seek any comments from me as [IPCC convening lead author] with Jones and they failed to look at any material on my web site? At the time of submission I was on travel and not able to comply with their deadlines. To me it suggests they did not do a very thorough job, not that I disagree with their findings.

3) However their review was very one-sided  and it was into charges against Jones and CRU. In reality the ones who had malfeasance were many of the critics who brought those changes and who misused and abused the emails and who should have been reprimanded.

The review was not balanced in this regard. I would have liked to see a commentary on the whole business. It was not there and it does not discourage such unjustified charges in future.

I guess I am really criticizing the mandate for the committee and they did not go beyond that. Given that charges were made against Phil that were not found to be valid, what does that say about those who brought the charges?

The criticism of Jones' openness is in regard to the making his data available and it is probably a bit overdone as Phil and other groups typically do not have funding to do all the extra data management and provide an ability to easily respond to any requests. This has implications for grants and funding agencies.