The key findings follow.

Allegation 1: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data?

Decision 1. As there is no substance to this allegation, there is no basis for further examination of this allegation in the context of an investigation in the second phase of RA-10.

Allegation 2: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?

Decision 2. As there is no substance to this allegation, there is no basis for further examination of this allegation in the context of an investigation in the second phase of RA-10.

Allegation 3: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to you in your capacity as an academic scholar?

Decision 3. As there is no substance to this allegation, there is no basis for further examination of this allegation in the context of an investigation in the second phase of RA-10.

Allegation 4. Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities?

Decision 4. Given that information emerged in the form of the emails purloined from CRU in November 2009, which have raised questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research activity, given that this may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist, and given that it may be undermining public trust in science in general and climate science specifically, the inquiry committee believes an investigatory committee of faculty peers from diverse fields should be constituted under RA-10 to further consider this allegation.

In sum, the overriding sentiment of this committee, which is composed of University administrators, is that allegation #4 revolves around the question of accepted faculty conduct surrounding scientific discourse and thus merits a review by a committee of faculty scientists.

An investigatory committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials will consider this matter and present its findings and recommendations to Dr. Henry C. Foley within 120 days of being charged.

There is a lot more detail in the 10 page report itself but this is pretty much the gist of it. Mann was totally exonerated on 3 of 4 allegations and the committee as it was currently constituted "could not make a definitive finding whether there exists any evidence to substantiate that Dr. Mann did engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that deviated from accepted practices within the academic community". And so a 2nd committee is being formed to look into the final allegation and will present their findings within 4 months which if they started soon after the findings of the 1st investigation were published implies sometime in early June we should know the final outcome.

@numerarius, I don't know if anyone else noticed but your Delta formula in reply #316 broke the thread for those of us that use IE7. I've had to use FF which is not my default (or favorite) browser to access this thread since you posted reply #316. Now that we're on a new page I can go back to IE7 but when you post html from MS Word or the like this often happens.

Instead of posting bad html you can instead use the "Insert custom character" button (the Ω) and insert a number of special characters including a capital delta Δ, a degree symbol °, and many others. Please use that where you can so that you don't Bork the thread for others.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

not to derail the thread but why are you still sticking to IE7?

Not to speak for anyone else, but for me it is what is on my work computer, which I have no control over so I couldn't switch if I wanted to. At home it's simply what I'm used to, and none of the supposed benefits of alternative seem worth the aggrivation.

Certainly conceptually there is the potential of some amount of positive feedback between an increase in heat melting ice thereby reducing albedo thus absorbing more heat.

Now the question becomes what has TSI actually been doing over the years. There are a lot of different graphs of TSI. I showed one earlier but I don't want to just post the same graph for the 4th time so I checked to see what else I could find.

Here's one that shows graphs of 10 different studies.

You'll note that the graph that shows the greatest increase over time is Hoyt, however that is obsolete, the data ended in 1980 so it's really not much use over the period of greatest interest which is the last 30 years.

What's funny however is that I happened to hit on a TSI graph at Watts site and guess which one he uses. Hoyt of course. Watts goes to great lengths to show correlation with the temperature record pre 1980 to Hoyt. Watts then goes into explaining how the PDO (pacific decadal oscillation) and the AMO (atlantic mutlidecadal oscillation) form a reasonable proxy for TSI and then he uses *that* graph to show correspondence between TSI and temperature from 1980 to present. Of course he doesn't mention what kind of weighting he had to apply to PDO vs. AMO or vice versa to get the proper shaped curve. At least I think that was the point of Watts argument in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/25/warming-trend-pdo-and-solar-correlate-better-than-co2/ which is itself rebutted in http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/exclamation-points/.

However when you have 10 studies 8 of which agree very closely I don't think it's good practice to pick the most extreme outlier simply because it comes closest to agreeing with the point you're trying to make.

Looking at any of the other graphs over the last 50 years I really don't see where the sudden huge increase in TSI occurred that somehow started this runaway positive feedback.

Really I think the best graph that showed what you're trying to say is the graph that I posted before so here it is for the 4th time. In this case let's ignore the temperature record so we don't send psycho into a tizzy.

So giving the best spin on this that is most supportive of psycho's argument let's start at the local minimum in 1970 and since then as he said there has been an increase in TSI which was assumedly the trigger for his runaway feedback. OK I can buy the idea that the rising level of TSI in the 1970 to 1980 timeframe would be accompanied with an increase in global average temperature. However the point is that if anything (which is what the 16 studies I cited concluded) since then there has been a gradual *decrease* in the "smoothed" TSI.

So if you assume this graph to be true then psycho's argument must be that we turned up the gas on the pot of water and started it boiling somewhere around 1980 but then since then we've been gradually reducing the gas while the pot of water has not only continued boiling but continued boiling both harder and faster.

Interesting story. I'm sorry but I need a much higher authority than myself, psycho, or Watts, to assert that this is the case before I could believe it.

I have it off myself whenever I'm not using it.  So many holes in the product...

That's what you get for being a retard.  Smoothed is irrelevant.  The increase in TSI is only around .1% as well.  The change in seasonal melt during that last hot period was more than sufficient to change the albedo by more than .1% against 1970 sea ice levels.  As such, it is clearly irrelevant that TSI has gone back down to 1970 levels as the sea ice has not.  When the sea ice is back to 1970 levels and the TSI is at 1970 levels, then you'll have a direct comparison between TSI and arctic temperatures.  Only an idiot would be working off ten year smoothed data to account for the behavior of a yearly cycle.

[quote]So if you assume this graph to be true then psycho's argument must be that we turned up the gas on the pot of water and started it boiling somewhere around 1980 but then since then we've been gradually reducing the gas while the pot of water has not only continued boiling but continued boiling both harder and faster.[quote]

You should probably stop making analogies.  They universally suck.  I'll fix this one for you.  The pot started out with an ice sheet on top of it from the sub zero temperatures outside and it's just barely warmed above freezing for the day.  So you brought it inside for an hour and then set it back outside after most of the ice melted.  Now that we've established an environmental temperature above freezing, and a container of water with ice in it, you should be able to figure out what happens to the temperature of that water when the ice is melted.

Ice pack is a significant damper to it's own destruction, when it breaks up just a little faster, the melt rate is rapidly accelerated.  You should be able to grasp this as you live in a place that gets snow.  The low level of multi-year ice, thanks to those multi-year spikes, leads to a massive decrease in the ice extent during the summer and a slower buildup during the winter to compliment it.  This means a significant increase in temperature irrespective of the albedo change.

Unless you really can't think your way out of a wet paper bag once someone has told you it's impossible to get out, this particular bout of idiocy should be over.  The pessimist in me says I've over-estimated you though.

When you get tired of living in your own little world, let me know.  Try not to suffocate in the meantime.

Would orbital bombardment cause temporary global warming?

TEC capital ships....

I was going to do another long post explaining the effect of ozone depletion and whatnot again, but it's a waste of time...

The surface station data has been manipulated to fit the models, and they rework them continuously to keep the anthropogenic effects matched to the temperatures as they come out and destroy the last versions prediction.  It's no surprise that they match up so well.

Maybe when you find something breaking down "anthropogenic effects" into something less vacuous, we'll have something to bother with.  The Artic having less ice is undoubtably blamed on CO2 regardless of the lack of foundation for the claim, that would be in the list of anthropogenic effects.  That thirty year blip of a time scale doesn't even show that the TSI is abnormally high compared to the thirty years before it.

It's a graph saying we blamed this all on CO2 and then made everything fit together by manual editing to make it work.

I think this thread has lost its steam.

Evaporation of water... is not a cause of steam being reduced.