Mike Nifong, the prosecutor of the Duke lacrosse scandal, is in the news for being disbarred for his handling of the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse team. This illustrates the difference in how concealment of material information is treated in most walks of life and the failure of the IPCC to see any moral dilemma in its role in actively concealing the adverse post-1960 results of the Briffa et al reconstruction. The IPCC authors’ response to criticism of the deletion was only that it would be “inappropriate” to show the adverse post-1960 results. Surely it’s “inappropriate” not to show them.
There’s another amusing connection. Tom Crowley, a key member of the Hockey Team, who acted as Michael Mann’s stunt double at the scheduled House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last summer (Mann sending a lawyer’s letter to the great amusement of the Republicans), prominently supported the now disbarred prosecutor. Here are a couple of amusing blog articles on Crowley here and here . Like the IPCC, Crowley seemed to see no problem with misconduct if it’s in a “good cause”.
Update – as noted by a poster below, Crowley retracted his comments shortly after making them, stating:
On Nov. 13, The Herald-Sun published an “Other Voices” piece by me concerning the Duke lacrosse case. I have subsequently been informed of errors in that letter. In particular my blanket statement about behavior of the lacrosse team was neither fair in general nor applicable to the particular case now in dispute. I apologize for this and any other errors.
The response to my letter has made me more aware of the intense emotions that are associated with this case. These tensions can only be bad for campus-community relations, and I strongly support any efforts to reduce them. Finally, I sincerely hope that lessons learned from the lacrosse case will be applied to future cases in order to lift the standards of justice for all in Durham County.
Usually, it’s prudent to try to get your facts right before making allegations.
Update: Just to be clear, I’ve met Crowley; we sat beside each other at the first House hearings and then I went out for beer afterwards with him and Myron Ebell and others – my mother would have approved of the diplomacy involved in getting this group together – and had a nice chat with him.
Our emails back and forth have been cheerful although ridiculously unproductive. He likes basketball which increases his standing immeasurably in my books. I mentioned a long time ago that I thought his text Crowley and North was very interesting and better than Bradley’s book.
He’s written some non-hockey stick articles which are pretty interesting. I’ve been meaning to post up some of his comments on lapse rate. However, he wrote an article in EOS in 2005 slagging me in which, like his letter on the lacrosse team, one fact after another was wrong. Nanne Weber of KNMI started off with a very unfavorable impression of me due to this article. I submitted a reply to EOS which they took 6 months to review and then rejected as being no longer topical, although the reviewer agreed that I had legitimate grievances with the Crowley article. I asked for a retraction and got nowhere.
Perhaps, in the spirit of reconciliation of Crowley’s retraction here, he might turn his mind to a similar retraction of his EOS article.
Climate Audit 