I'm back in the saddle briefly. I've taken a look at the report and it looks pretty much as expected. The section on Ross McKitrick's allegation of fabrication makes for fairly jaw-dropping reading. I'm also intrigued by a section which deals with implied allegations rather than actual ones.
Nothing on the replacement of James Saiers at GRL either.
I'll add more comments as things occur to me. Feel free to add comments.
Update: Here's the bit on the fabrication allegation. Remember - the allegation is that Jones inserted a groundless statement that McKitrick's findings were "statistically insignificant". Here's what Jones said in his evidence to Russell:
The basis for this statement is that if the CRUTEM3 trend is reduced by the factor claimed by MM2004, the land-based record then becomes incompatible with the ocean and the satellite record. MM2004 make no mention of this in their paper. In writing Chapter 3 of AR4 the author team were mindful of this. MM2004‘s analysis of the land surface temperature record is completely at odds with the rest of the surface and lower tropospheric temperature records. MM2004 also fails to take into account the effects of changes in the atmospheric circulation.
And the panel said:
Having read most of the relevant papers... we observe a consistence of view amongst those who disagree with MM2004 that has been sustained over the last 6 years, that the large scale organisation of atmospheric circulation produces a spatially integrated response to forcing. Although we do not comment on the relative merits of the two views, we see no justification of the view that that this response was ―invented, or even that its various expressions in the response to reviewer Gray or the final text are fundamentally different.
So Jones seems to have changed his argument from "McKitrick's findings are statistically insignificant" to "McKitrick's findings conflict with other evidence". Whether this is true or not is irrelevant of course. The fact remains that Jones has been unable to provide any support for the claim that was inserted in the IPCC text. This means that the allegation of fabrication stands. What is even more interesting, there seems to be an attempt to hide behind joint authorship - the finger of blame can't be pointed at Jones because everyone wrote the chapter.
The consequences are ugly: joint authorship implies joint and several responsibility for the text and allegation of fabrication that still hangs over it. I don't think this was what Sir Muir intended.
Who else is now implicated?