Over the course of the day I've made several telephone calls to the Royal Society, without being able to get a response to the simple question of who it was within their ranks who selected the eleven CRU papers for Lord Oxburgh's panel to examine. These papers, you will remember "were selected on the advice of the Royal Society".
Just after 4pm I finally got through to the person responsible and seconds later an emailed response arrived as well. This was fortuitous because I was able to ask some questions on the contents.
So, who was it? Here is the Royal Society's statement:
The Royal Society agreed to suggest to UEA possible members for the Scientific Assessment panel that would investigate the integrity of the research of UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
Members of the panel were suggested on the basis of the excellence of their work and their breadth of expertise and experience (including statistical capability).
The Royal Society recommended that the panel had access to any and all papers that it requested and suggested that the review begin by looking at key publications, which were chosen to cover a broad range of subjects over a wide timescale.
Whoah! Get that! They told them only to look at lots of papers. Not which particular ones?
With the press officer still on the line, I asked the question: "So you didn't actually advise UEA which papers they should look at?" and the response was:
"This is the only statement we are willing to make at the moment."
And I said,
"So it's a bit sensitive, then?"
And the reply was,
"This is the only statement we are willing to make at the moment."
So, ladies and gentlemen. I think we can now say with considerable certainty that Lord Oxburgh's declaration that he took the advice of the Royal Society as to which papers to examine is not true.
So who did choose them then?
There's a clue back at the start of the story of Lord Oxburgh's panel. When the investigation was announced, the BBC had this to say:
UEA, in consultation with the Royal Society, has suggested that the panel looks in particular at key publications from the body of CRU's research which were referred to in the university's recent submission to the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee.
We know, of course, that the bit about the Royal Society is not true. But if you look at the UEA select committee submission, you find in the appendix a list of papers which bears an extraordinary similarity to the list that was looked at by the Oxburgh panel. If you strike off the non-UEA papers, you seem to be left with only a single discrepancy - the appendix points to Jones et al 1997 (J Clim) while the Oxburgh panel looked at Briffa et al 2001 (JGR).
So we have an extraordinary coincidence - that both the UEA submission to the select comittee and Lord Oxburgh's panel independently came up with almost identical lists of papers to look at, and that they independently neglected key papers like Jones 1998 and Osborn and Briffa 2006.
I don't think so. Could it be, could it possibly be that Lord Oxburgh's panel were given a list of papers to look at by UEA?
Acton's Eleven.