Joe, if it had been a whitewash, they would have exonerated him on all four issues, said “nothing to see here”, and moved on. Instead, they left the broadest of issues open, with another 120 days of investigation by a separate committee; that issue, of basically appearing to have violated the norms of science, is a lot riskier than the others for Mann.
Now, let’s be clear on a couple of things. First off, Foley is someone I’ve known by reputation for 35 years, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying he was dishonorable. On the other hand, like all University administrators, he primarily wants controversy to go away; he has grants to big for and donors to schmooze. So I don’t doubt that they would have just loved to be able to say it was all nothing if they could. Clearly, they couldn’t do it with straight faces.
Second, I don’t think Mann is a primary player in this: he had a paper that was flawed, but no one in the climate science community realized it was flawed; he needed a real statistician. This is unfortunately endemic in a lot of this kind of science — if these folks were really strong in maths they would have become physicists or something, and statistical studies are just too easily skewed by fairly tiny choices. Mann made some decisions about specific statistical manipulations that no one caught, and wound up with a hockey-stick generator. The code fit data in such a way that he got the famous “hockey stick”. Then, his hockey stick became popular — it “verified” something Hansen had been saying for years, it made a nice slide in “Inconvenient Truth.”
All of a sudden he was adopted by the cool kidz, got invited to their parties, got to meet powerful people, started getting grants, was set for tenure. It’s no wonder he started going to lengths to defend the hockey stick, even though I don’t think what he did in “hiding the decline” was good science. You can see that in the emails too — he expressed some hesitation a couple of times, but quickly backed down, rather than risk being drummed out of the clique.
Now, going back to that fourth charge, there’s something about it that you may not be seeing: at least while the investigation continues, Mann is more vulnerable than he has ever been. His reputation has been hurt. People won’t want to co-author papers with im, granting agencies will be more cautious about grants on which he’s the principal investigator.
And everything that people find in FOIAs to come, in emails not yet examined, will factor into his eventual fate. And there are a lot of shoes yet to drop.
