User:Tillman/GWPF report

In July 2010, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK think tank that is is skeptical about global warming policy, asked Andrew Montford to lead an inquiry into the three British investigations of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, dubbed "Climategate" in the media. His report The Climategate Inquiries was published in September 2010.

Lord Andrew Turnbull, who wrote the foreword to the GWPF report, says the University of East Anglia's internal enquiries into the Climategate affair were hasty and superficial, and called for Parliament to sponsor two wide-ranging investigations into climate science. Andrew Miller, chairman of the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee, said his committee would make further investigations into conduct at the University of East Anglia, but rejected Turnbull's call for a wider Parliamentary enquiry as a "futile task".

Fred Pearce wrote in The Guardian that the three inquiries Montford looked into were all badly flawed, and that Montford's report ably dissects their failures. He writes that the report, "for all its sharp—and in many cases justified—rejoinders to the official inquiries ... is likely to be ignored in some quarters for its brazen hypocrisy." Pearce argues that one of the criticisms of the three inquiries was that no climate sceptics were on the inquiry teams, and now the critics themselves have produced a review of the reviews that included no one not already supportive of the sceptical position. But, Pearce wrote, Montford "has landed some good blows here."

A UEA spokesman said that all three of the previous inquiries had "found in favour" of its climate scientists, and added that "the GWPF report appears to offer nothing new or previously unavailable."