The Accounting Officer and Permanent Secretary, Muir Russell, was semi-detached
from the process.

Tory peer Lord Fraser said there was no single “villain of the piece” when it came to the problems which plagued the building of the Scottish Parliament.
Announcing his findings, the inquiry head said it still astonished him that ministers were kept in the dark over cost increases.

He cleared the late First Minister Donald Dewar of misleading MSPs.

However, he named Sir Muir Russell, former head of the Scottish civil service, as a man with responsibility.

He said: “Clearly the top man was Sir Muir Russell – there was a number of very sharp criticisms made of him in the Scottish Parliament, and I respectfully adopt their recommendations.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/scotland/3656166.stm

Starting at CA, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Oct 29, 2009. Then we have that The Muir-Russell inquiry is formed on Dec. 3, 2010. Next, we have the RSE (Boulton, General Secretary,) “has launched its next major inquiry, Facing up to Climate Change…” on January 10, 2010. The UK Parliamentary Inquiry into CRU is announced on Jan. 22. Last update on the evidence page for “Facing up to Climate Change” is Jan. 29. The schools competition page last updated on Feb. 8. Last day for the UK PI is Feb. 10. On Feb. 11 the current inquiry is announced at UEA and at cce-review.org/. The deadline for CCE submissions is Mar. 1, 2010. “The Review hopes to have submit preliminary conclusions to UEA in Spring 2010.” The deadline to submissions to RSE Facing up to Climate Change is May 1. The deadline for the schools competition is June, 2010.

Of course, all inquiries, competitions, etc. are claimed to be completely independent. The shills in the shell game also pretend to be independent.

Steve: In this sort of letter, it is important to connect these points to the representations by the inquiry. The Inquiry claimed that they selected people because they had no predetermined views – presumably because they had believed this to be important.

Did he write the infamous part about the Himalayan glaciers in the IPCC report?

No, but if you find the right glacier and look at the face of it at just the right angle, you’ll see deep within it a holographic picture of Geoffrey Boulton. Coincidentally, just before this picture is melted out, the Earth will be destroyed via global warming to make room for a hyperspacial bypass.

Muir Russel would have had to expose the fact that
(1) the climategate emails and programming are true and valid copies
(2) that Jones did defy FOI requests, and asked others to do so
(3) That they have been hiding the decline (or lack of recent warming)
(4) that there most probably was a significant Medieval Warm period
(5) that Jones has ‘lost’ the original data and can’t reproduce it…

etc etc etc.

This is now all out in the public domain : all that remains is for the inquiry to formally confirm it.

If on the other hand Jones hadn’t admitted all this in advance his buddies would have had to expose him in a more formal way leading to possible criminal charges.

Don’t expect anything new from the Inquiry.

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/people/person.html?indv=437

Did he write the infamous part about the Himalayan glaciers in the IPCC report?

He appears to have gone through public life with a significant achievement, it doesn’t look good for a fair inquiry, if it was the people who were “hounding” the CRU would be called to give evidence.

On the question of the FOIs, I’ve checked the records, there were a total of 105 from Jan 2005 until December 2009, five years they are distributed as follows:

4 in 2007

2 in 2008

99 in 2009:

58 were identical requests for the contracts the CRU held with various countries, each one had a list of different countries

26 appear to have come after the CRU emails were released.

15 others, I haven’t been able to analyse.