Now that Climategate’s so called Independent Climate Change E-mails Review committee—(see climate scientist Patrick Michael’s Wall Street Journal article here explaining why the committee is anything but “independent”)—has concluded that the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) “are not in doubt,” the media is having a field day.

We can now put Climategate “behind us,” says the New York Times. So what that the email exchanges in question were “dismissive of contrarian views,” writes the editors.

“The Earth is heating up, and there are cold, hard facts to prove it. That’s according to a new report from an independent panel…” states the NY Daily News editorial.

That, of course, is both absurd and inaccurate. The committee’s report is clear that their review did not look into the accuracy of the science in question: “It is important to note that we offer no opinion on the validity of their scientific work,” the report says.

It is also important to note that it is not just the global warming “skeptics” that have challenged many of the CRU scientists’ findings. In fact, numerous emails in question reveal just how much disagreement there is over warming among CRU experts and peers.

India’s Economic Times has an excellent article today on this very subject. The author writes:

Phil Jones (regarding queries from climate sceptic S McIntyre). “I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.”

Phil Jones to Michael Mann. “And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp [file transfer protocol] sites — you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.”

KEITH Briffa. “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data, but in reality, the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) show some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming…”

Phil Jones. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK, it has, but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant .”

On February 13 this year, Phil Jones told BBC that “there has been no statistically significant warming over the last 15 years.”

Kevin Trenberth, UCAR, October 12, 2009, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t .”

Professor Mojib Latif, an IPCC member , recently said, “For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.” Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. The NAO was now moving into a colder phase (New Scientist, September 2009).

The National Research Council appointed by US Congress concluded that “the substantial uncertainties in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about AD 1600 lower our confidence in this (hockey stick) conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al(1999) that the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.”