Bishop Hill Poisoning the well
Dec 30, 2011 Climate: Mann Climate: McIntyre FOI As Mosher and Fuller noted in The CRUTape Letters, in the first years of the twenty-first century relations between Phil Jones and Steve McIntyre were relatively collegial. However, something changed during 2003 and thereafter Jones adopted an approach of blocking all McIntyre's requests for data.
It's hard to tell exactly what prompted this change of heart - the two major events of 2003 were the Soon and Baliunas affair and publication of MM03. Since both of these were critiques directed at Mann, it's not obvious why they would affect Jones. Clearly Jones had to be persuaded that there was a group interest in resisting McIntyre's efforts and in email #1566 we get a taste of how this was achieved. In it, Mann tells other members of the Hockey team about an email he has just sent to McIntyre, telling him that he will not respond to further requests for information (see The Hockey Stick Illusion p.91).
FYI--thought you guys should have this (below). This guy "McIntyre" appears to be yet another shill for industry--he appears to be the one who forwarded the the scurrilous "climateskeptic" criticisms of the recent Bradley et al Science paper. Here is an email I sent him a few weeks ago in response to an inquiry. It appears, by the way, that he has been trying to break into our machine ("multiproxy"). Obviously, this character is looking for any little thing he can get ahold of...
The best that can be done is to ignore their desperate emails and, if they manage to slip something into the peer-reviewed literature, as in the case of Soon & Baliunas, deal w/ it as we did in that case--i.e., the Eos response to Soon et al---they were stung badly by that, and the bad press that followed.For those of you who haven't seen it, I'm forwarding an interesting email exchange from John Holdren of Harvard that I got the other day. He summarized the whole thing very nicely, form an independent perspective...
Cheers,
mike
p.s. I'm setting up my email server so that it automatically rejects emails from the "usual suspects". You might want to do the same. As they increasingly get automatic reject messages from the scientists, they'll start to get the picture...
Reader Comments (89)
Is there a copy of the Holdren email in the email batch? Would be interesting to see as he is now a science advisor to Obama.
"Shills for industry" is a phrase more fitting Mann and the "Team" considering the financial support from Shell, BP and major bankers which is documented in the emails.
Someone ought to sue this pezzonovante for a LOT of money.
Nik
The HOldren email is #0239
Your Grace,
do you mean 'collegial', or should that be 'congenial'?
I've recently posted on the "Green costs ..." thread referring to the warmists' habit of treating all those who disagree with them like cretins and here is a classic example.
From what I have seen and read of both sets of Climategate emails, Mann is an arrogant bully and has probably done more to damage climate science in the last decade than the rest of his colleagues put together.
He is not unique in refusing to countenance any view — well-reasoned or otherwise — which casts even the slightest doubt on his abilities, his research, his findings, and the mountain of toys round his pram grows higher with every passing day. This would probably have been enough to intimidate Jones who comes across in his emails and interviews as not being a desperately strong character. Meat and drink to someone like Mann. The views of a psychologist would be interesting based on his emails and speeches.
It's just as well the science is settled (allegedly) because for sure we ain't gonna make any progress with him in the room.
Mike Jackson
Collegial - "the relationship between colleagues". That's kind of the sense I'm after, yes, although they are only colleagues in a broad sense.
Thanks.
Just not a word that I am overly-familiar with. (Comes of not having much of a collegial occupation!!)
Mann... the gift that keeps on giving! Is it just me or can none of these guys put a coherent email together?
Now he accuses S.M. of "trying to break into our machine"! Interesting start to the N.Y. and I await S.M's response!
Bish:
I went searching independently and came to the same conclusion (even though the date is three days before the Mann email we have here he's talking as if some but not all his recipients will have already recently got it, which checks out). The same email with a slightly different header format was included in CG1: #1066337021
Talking of independence, I am the only one to find this hilarious:
This guy has his categories badly mixed up. McIntyre is providing a valuable independent perspective but Mann thinks he's "another shill for industry". Holdren is providing a prestigious sort of echo chamber for his own phony ideas and he thinks that's an independent perspective.
And this is in 2003. Self-deception can take you a long distance from reality in eight years. Especially with a group this pliable. How everyone was kept in line that long must have something to do with Holdren and Schneider but I'm sure that's not the end of it. Roll on CG3.
Thanks BH. I just read that email from Holdren. Ir was interesting to see the extent to which Holdren was also a peripheral member of the team and interesting to see that Holdren never really dug into specifics about the hockey stick but just used a series of ad homs and arguments from authority to dismiss the Soon and Baliunas paper. Perhaps with Holdren on side the team decided that they were unbeatable and could do what they liked.
'collegial' - perhaps 'cordial' ? Or is that too warm? Mike Jackson makes a good point, that Jones is doesn't seem to be a strong character (although basically eager to please) and may have been vulnerable to pressure from a bully like Mann.
A 1995 paper by Holdren to the World Bank shows a quote that Holdren thought useful in defining sustainability:
"You cannot talk about sustainability without talking about people, about politics, about power and control."
Team think?
I think it particularly telling that Mann, who has spent all his career being funded by the tax-payer, which ultimately means he is funded by the wealth created by industry, has such a hatred for industry. I suspect it comes from the fact that he knew that he could never hold-down a job in industry, where "the labourer is worthy of his hire" - in otherwords, he would have to add value. As an academic doing dodgy "science", he has clearly shown that he has no hire value. His arrogance in the light of his ineptitude is astounding (or he suffers from cognitive dissonance).
Does Mann have NPD? From Wikipedia:
"The symptoms of Narcissistic personality disorder can be similar to the traits of individuals with strong self-esteem and confidence, differentiation occurs when the underlying psychological structures of these traits are considered pathological. Narcissists have such an elevated sense of self-worth that they value themselves as inherently better than others. Yet, they have a fragile self-esteem and cannot handle criticism, and will often try to compensate for this inner fragility by belittling or disparaging others in an attempt to validate their own self-worth. It is this sadistic tendency that is characteristic of narcissism as opposed to other psychological conditions affecting level of self-worth
Patrick Moffitt says
"You cannot talk about sustainability without talking about people, about politics, about power and
control."
He is exactly right and it is all in the UN Agenda 21 publication. Read it on line.http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
Without wishing to pin labels on either Jones or Mann, they both come across as being extremely thin-skinned. Even the mildest pinprick of criticism appears to be felt like a moral wound by either man. Both try to deal with this affliction with contrasting (and probably, life-long) coping strategies... Jones seems to cower away to lick his wounds and sulk, whilst Mann reacts by overwhelming a perceived opponent with (well-rehearsed) bombast. Classic fleeing or fighting responses (with a rawness most of us might still remember from the playground). From this position, both men need each other. Jones is needed for his pliability (as noted by Richard Drake above) and Mann is needed as an auxiliary ego - because he has all the 'qualities' sorely absent to Jones.
A remarkable double act - but with characteristics we more usually find in the arts rather than the sciences.
Dec 30, 2011 at 5:09 PM | Serge
"Does Mann have NPD?"
I have only had the misfortune to come across one Sociopath, but Mann appears to have many of the traits.
That's enough on the sociopath stuff thanks.
Did Holdren participate in the "Direct Action at Harvard" ?
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/28/direct-action-at-harvard/
Did he ever apologize ?
Each person has different personality traits that vary in degree from one person to the next. A label such as NPD would require a diagnosis by a professional but I will say that some of the behaviors shown are consistent with a person who is a bit higher on the scale of narcissism than the average person. I certainly get the impression that the response to criticism or anything that represents potential criticism ( a research conclusion counter to his conclusions, for example, being a potential threat) does seem to get an "over the top" reaction. And the pattern is rather typical. We first see devaluation as in "this person isn't worthy of a response from me" sort of behaviors. We also see responses that appear to be designed to be very intimidating. It does appear that Mann experienced Soon and Baliunas as some sort of personal attack.
Most people believe that they are not unlike others. They tend to believe that everyone experiences things the same way they do. You can often tell a bit about a person's own personality by their choice of insults and accusations.
4808.txt is interesting. See how he uses the word "weapon" and believes that the purpose of Soon and Baliunas is to influence policy. If someone is out to influence policy in some way, it would be natural for them to assume that others are out for the same goal. In some ways it is like a cheat always accusing others of cheating them. They are projecting their own behaviors and priorities and motivations onto others. We all do that to some extent. We might ask ourselves why someone did something, attempt to put ourselves in their position, and then plumb our own personality to find out why we might do that particular thing and in coming to a conclusion, have projected our own behaviors onto someone else.
People can not be separated from their personalities and personality often plays a big role in how people do things. But you can often get a glimpse of someone's own behaviors by the behaviors they attribute to others as they unintentionally attribute others of having the same sort of motivations they have. That Mann sees this paper as a "weapon" in an activist campaign to influence policy might really mean that he himself uses research papers as weapons in an activist campaign and logically expects others to do the same.
That is quite insightful. Pielke Jr is fond of portraying, there exists a 'climate science', which is then 'politicized' from the outside. Here we have clear evidence of the same happening from within.
It is highly likely that Mann contributed significantly to politicization of the entire Team establishment by setting up norms of behaviour as soon as the first requests for data access were emerging, thus ensuring his career longevity. People outside can underestimate how insecure academics can be, and how ruthless the ratrace to the top of the pile can be.
Secondly, it is instructive to note how Mann's reflexive assumption of politics led to his own politicization.
Thirdly, Mann lets it slip that the entire Soon and Baliunas response was a 'thing that they did'.
Bish:
Besides MM03, which we all know exposed the original hockey stick for what it was, Jones was a co-author with Mann on the Mann/Jones 2003 paper and the EOS paper rebutting Soon Baliunas (both of which used the Yang reconstruction). Maybe the good doctor Jones did not want to help M&M take his two papers apart by, especially since that paper relied on a series that Bradly called "crap" in the Climategate 2 emails?
The whole shoddy thing is posted on CA: http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/25/behind-closed-doors-perpetuating-rubbish/
Two wrongs don't make a right. The wrongs are the MBH98/99 hockey stick and Soon & Baliunas (2003). The right is the over-arching scientific consensus that CO2 is the main cause of recent warming.
Pointing to the flaws in these papers does not change this. Nor does the fact that both were used as tools to influence policy have any bearing on the atmospheric physics underpinning the mainstream view that more CO2 will cause further warming.
Philosopher Gary Gutting's NYT opinion piece is, or should be, thought-provoking.
I do find it interesting that Jones was recently co-author of a paper that shows a significant MWP and LIA in the Southern Hemisphere:
http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/papers2/Neukom_et_al_2010.pdf
I wonder if he has been putting distance between himself and Mann. Clearly this paper shows that the MWP was not local in scope.
I would say there has been a considerable amount of coercion in reaching that "consensus". People are literally afraid to speak their minds as is evidenced in some of the emails. I believe there is much less consensus in reality than has been portrayed publicly. People getting fired for their views on an issue is one reason to create a facade of "consensus" when none really exists. You simply shut people up by threatening them.
@BBD
You are are going to hang your hat on the debunked "consensus" claim? Not even Mike Hulme of the UEA and the Tyndall Center believes in that fairy tale:
http://www.probeinternational.org/Hulme-Mahony-PiPG[1].pdf
"the over-arching scientific consensus that CO2 is the main cause of recent warming"
Oh beat the drum slowly, BBD.
Andrew
There are many facets to this story beyond Mann's aggressive attitude, for example here
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=5793
Tom Wigley asked Mann good questions, but Mann just didn't answer and referred to a Connolly Wiki article. It appears that Wigley then just swallowed that.
Another facet is expressed here, where Mann comes up with his story of the "excel spread sheet problem". It all sounds bizarre and unreal, and perhaps that just scared everybody to ask further questions, which may have resulted in more of that sort.
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/4742.txt
I think there is ample evidence that Mann is the alpha male (aka Chief Narcissist) of the Team -- it's hard to imagine him stammering and mumbling before a Select Committee like Jones did.
Mann would have cajoled and dragged Jones up the mountain to climate fame, and while Jones may have enjoyed the view for a while, it got uncomfortably chilly after Climategate.
There are some people who genuinely enjoy being in the limelight, and some who don't.
Jones, I feel, is one of those who would rather be left alone to learn about how to plot trends in Excel, and losing data.
A third paper in 2003 was Shaviv/Veizer also mentionend by Mann in the climategate emails. Rahmstorf and several other non experts organized a reply, again in EOS journal, They simply critizied everything with just the quality you would expect from non-experts and of course got the last word.
http://www.sciencebits.com/ClimateDebate
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/ClimateDebate/RahmstorfDebate.pdf
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/ClimateDebate/RahmReplyReply.pdf
One of the Rahmstorf's co-authors was Stocker from Switzerland, who is now co-chair of AR5 WG1. I think the draft completely avoids cosmic rays, Shaviv/Veizer 2003, Shaviv 2005, Svensmark or any of the recent CERN CLOUD results.
BBD
Gary Gutting's piece certainly provokes thoughts in me, and they largely involve throttling him. He comes across as a pompous twit and his writing is a bog-standard defence of appeals to authority.
It would be too boring to deconstruct his mostly circular arguments. I think he yearns for a pre-internet era when 'experts' were in tight control of how they are perceived. And his references to 'consensus' via [Sic] [Sic] are the same as we have long-debated, including the issues of pal-review, proven manipulation, political infiltration etc, etc.
This is what gets my goat:
Hogwash. So, the consensus can never be threatened except from within? That worked so well for the medical establishment of the C19th that scores of thousands of people died needlessly of cholera. Not to mention more modern examples where the perps are still alive defending the indefensible.
Grrr.
BBD. What were the flaws in the Soon and Ballinius papers. as an academic paper it added little to the already understood history of our climate. They simply took a number of previous peer reviewed academic papers and showed that they all demonstrated a MWP. It's difficult to understand what they could possibly have done wrong, unless they wilfully misrepresented the scientific literature.
I agree that there is an overwhelming consensus that CO2 is a GHG and that, all other things being equal, it will raise the temperature of the atmosphere. There the consensus should end, because no one is capable of predicting the future.
Other great consensi are:
That white light was the purest form of light and could not be broken down further (Newton had a paper rejected by the Royal Society on the basis of this consensus).
Light travelled in waves.
Atoms and molecules didn't exist. (causing the suicide of the bi-polar Ludwig Boltzmann).
And many, many others. In science consensus counts for nothing, and those who want to shut down a debate, presumably because they don't have faith that their ideas will pass muster under critical scrutiny, are by definition, not scientists, but cultists.
I made consensi up!
geronimo
Go over to the discussion thread, Soon Balunias et al. The argument, and where we might agree and disagree, is all laid out there. Weigh in.
Gixxerboy tx.
Gixxer
At its simplest, you can read Gutting as saying: blog 'experts' cut no ice in the real world. Though my reading of his argument is that it is a little more complex than this ;-)
A careful reconsideration of these paragraphs may be useful at this point:
boballab
Of course there is a scientific consensus about the role of CO2 as a GHG and its implications for future climate change.
You are painfully incorrect. This is 'sceptic' nonsense.
To be clear, along with a large number of others, I am ever-less interested in what Mike Hulme says.
Mike J
"the mountain of toys round his pram"
:-)
As I think someone else here said a while ago, Mann's behaviour does recall the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers who opined that Basil could provide enough material for a whole conference.
BBD
I'm sure that most here accept that CO2 has a minor rôle as a GHG, but it is hard to equate that with the catastrophic forecasts, especially when CO2 levels been so much higher without those runaway effects, or even much synchronicity with global temperatures, which seem to do their own thing, in time-honoured fashion.
Why is it so scary?
'been' = 'have been'
CO2 'a minor role as GHG'? And no doubt you expect me to take you seriously too...
Ye gods. 'Sceptics'.
When CO2 levels were higher, the planet was warmer. When they fell, so did T. The 50My of Cenozoic cooling demonstrates this rather well.
Proposed NY resolution for you: do some reading.
Uh, a) not always was it warmer when CO2 was higher and b) when the two did correlate T typically fell first. Really now..
Mark
Laying all the blame for a ~1C temperature solely at the door of something with a 1:2,500 dilution is not far off homeopathy in my book, and trying to predict what the climate is going to do in 50 years time comes pretty close to astrology.
In the opening sentence quoted, Gutting speaks of "creditable parties" to the global warming debate. Since this phrase appears per se to be meaningless one has to assume that he means "credible parties" but since he then goes on to tell us in effect who these "credible parties" are and since, as a philosopher he has no more standing in relation to the science that underpins global warming than any other layman (a PhD in Philosophy — I assume it's in Philosophy; he's not kind enough to tell us on his web site — does not confer encyclopaedic knowledge of the relevant disciplines as far as I know) I'm not sure why we should pay much regard to his philosophical musings, interesting though they may be.
He manages brilliantly to miss the target with the last sentence quoted:There is indeed no reason to think that sceptics would have a problem "accepting a consensus of climate scientists against global warming, had this emerged" but not because it was a consensus. In fact I am fairly certain that there are a number of sceptics, on this blog amongst other places, who would have been suspicious of the loudly trumpeted consensus no matter which side of the fence it was being touted from.
Gutting also misses the point withWhy not? Since science is not done by consensus a minority position is essential to the furtherance of knowledge. And the "non-experts" that he refers to include an increasing number who are very much expert in fields related to study of the earth and its systems, as has been more than amply demonstrated on this blog alone in the last fortnight as the "Green costs you more" thread shows.
The New York Times article was horrible.
Regarding Jones / Mann relationship, it would be perhaps useful to looks at some dots :
- Univ of East-Anglia's CRU unit funded by the US Dept of Energy
- (according to John O'Sullivan - Canada Free press 13 may 2010) Dept of Energy gave Mann a 'post doc' research grant in 1996, whilst Mann is still not a 'doctor' ; indeed his PHD paper (on oceans) did not attract much interest at Yale in 1996. He started working on tree rings thanks to this DoE grant. He got his PhD in 1998 only, with a new PhD supervisor, Barry Saltzman, an active promoter of the CO2 theory, after publishing the famous MBH 1998 paper.
This background may add to the fact that Mann is clearly a strong character, used to intimidate anybody on his way, and ready to use any mean to 'prove' the theory he is promoving
BBD
"But nonexperts are in no position to argue against the consensus of scientific experts."
This is one of several untrue points. Errors in Hockey Stick papers are so basic and trivial, that you don't have to be a Climate Scientist to understand these. It is just the opposite way, Climate Scientists did heavily use statistical methods without being trained in the field and without even interacting with trained statisticians. That is why each and every Hockey Stick paper does not support the Hockey Stick, once the basic errors are removed. That's why the only way mainstream Climate Science can handle a statisticians' paper such as McShane 2010 is to ignore it.
Many of these papers, such as Rahmstorf et al. 2007, the second most quoted paper after Mann's Hockeystick, should have simply not passed peer review, in any paper and in any branch of science, and at a certain point, even the NYT must have had the skills to find that out for themselves.
If the NYT tries to install a virtual reality to protect themselves, it should be noted, that their role has by no means been that of a passive observer, tricked by a closed group of maleficient scientists.
Mark T
A/.
What are you refering to? Snowball Earth? I do hope you are as it provides an excellent demonstration of how halting the absorption phase of the carbon cycle can increase atmospheric radiative forcing sufficient to lift climate out of an albedo-locked icehouse.
B/.
This will be Vostok core data. In the millenia after Milankovitch forcing has peaked, GAT slowly falls. The RF from ~280ppmv CO2 is insufficient to halt the cooling, although it does delay it. GAT falls at a slightly more rapid rate than the reduction in the atmospheric fraction of CO2. RF from CO2 is not the dominant forcing during glacial/interglacial transitions.
You haven't really got a firm grasp on the basics, have you?
Markus
Upthread I pointed out that two wrongs don't make a right. I specifically mentioned MBH98/99 as one of the wrongs. I went on to state that one or two (or three or four) ill-founded papers do not matter. They change nothing. The entire Mannean Hockey Stick and defence of same changes nothing.
In 1979, Charney et al. estimated climate sensitivity to a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 ppmv to be about 3C.
IPCC AR4 WG1 reviewed 25 further years of research into this question and arrived at the same most likely value in 2007. This isn't corruption or incompetence. It is the testing and confirmation of the basis of a scientific consensus on the climate system's sensitivity to a fixed value change in RF.
Argue about hockey sticks all you want. It changes nothing.
Good distraction tactics though.
BBD that's again not true or plausible in several ways.
Firstly, if temperatures have been warmer in the medieval warm period and at a few thousand years minimum 150 years ago, natural variability has not been understood and is not accounted for correctly by climate models and mainstream climate scientists.
Climate model sensitivity computations are then false, because they cannot reconstruct the past, sensitivity regression reconstructions (e.g. from ice cores) are then false as well, because contributing factors are not understood.
Secondly, there have been a number of recent publications indicating a much lower sensitivity or even wrong sign (!) and there have again been disturbingly quick replies indicating again more anomalies or failures in peer review.
Thirdly, there is disturbing overlap between the authors of disturbing Hockey Stick papers, sensitivity papers, climategate trickers, climategate peer review distorters and AR4 WG1 authors.
Fourthly, it goes on in AR5 WG1. Co-chair Stocker is one of the co-authors of the bizarre reply to Shaviv/Veizer's cosmic ray paper. Cosmic rays are completely spared in the draft, despite recent advances. The AR5 draft simply lies about climate models and their disability to reconcile ground and troposheric temperature trends.
Markus
You start with a very contentious 'If'. In fact there is no convincing evidence that global average temperature was warmer than the mid-C20th at any point during the period 800CE - 1200CE.
The exact cause or causes of the MWP are still being argued, although an increase in TSI and low volcanic sulphate aerosol load are plausibly hypothesised. Neither applies now. Neither can explain the warming since the 1970s.
Can you provide references for this:
Also, please consider the contradiction in your position: You argue for substantial natural variability and a low climate sensitivity in the same breath. You can't have it both ways.
You conclude by claiming that the AR5 draft (WG1?) 'lies about climate models and their disability to reconcile ground and troposheric temperature trends'. Yet you provide nothing concrete to back up this very serious accusation of misconduct.
May I suggest that you take this up with Richard Betts as and when he next shows up? And good luck with that.
BBD,
First,
there is ample evidence that MWP temperatures were above current temperatures:
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/quantitative.php
To me, the most conclusive evidence comes from Uni Heidelberg.
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/presse/ruca/ruca07-3/klima.html
Though above example covers only Europe and the North Atlantic, one of the authors made clear elsewhere ".. it is not local. We see this from the Alps up to Norway, all correlated and synchronous. North-Atlantic synchronous, China synchronous, Chile synchronous, they are all synchronous, this is the great thing about stalagmites, because, as we can date them so well, we really see those peaks happening at all places at the same time."
Second,
Shaviv (2005)[21] carried out a similar analysis for 6 different time scales, ranging from the 11-yr solar cycle to the climate variations over geological time scales. He found a typical sensitivity of 0.54±0.12°K/(W m−2) or 2.1 °C (ranging between 1.6 °C and 2.5 °C at 99% confidence) if there is no cosmic-ray climate connection, or a typical sensitivity of 0.35±0.09°K/(W m−2) or 1.3 °C (between 0.99 °C and 2.5 °C at 99% confidence), if the cosmic-ray climate link is real. (Note Shaviv quotes a radiative forcing equivalent of 3.8Wm−2. [ΔTx2=3.8 Wm−2 λ].)
Lindzen and Choi
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/16/new-paper-from-lindzen-and-choi-implies-that-the-models-are-exaggerating-climate-sensitivity/
Spencer
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/07/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-my-initial-comments-on-the-new-dessler-2011-study/
New study in Science
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/25/new-study-in-science-shows-climate-sensitivity-is-overhyped/
Third,
"Neither can explain the warming since the 1970s"
There is no need for an external explanation, as according to Heidelberg's research, temperatures have fluctuated by up to 3 degrees within short periods of time in the past. Coming from a multithousand year low an increase by less than 1 degrees in 150 years needs no explanation.
Fourth,
"Also, please consider the contradiction in your position: You argue for substantial natural variability and a low climate sensitivity in the same breath. You can't have it both ways."
Following Shaviv 2005 above makes clear that inclusion of a new, previously overlooked contributor reduces sensitivity.
Fifth:
"You conclude by claiming that the AR5 draft (WG1?) 'lies about climate models and their disability to reconcile ground and troposheric temperature trends'. Yet you provide nothing concrete to back up this very serious accusation of misconduct."
You are right, it was no lie, it was just another "trick", which in climate science is a "good way to solve a problem" (Gavin Schmidt). Actually, this is in my view even more disturbing as you may bring a liar to a justice, but if someone tricks you, the damage is all yours.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/13/watch-the-pea-ar5-chapter-10/