Last night, I got an exclusive interview with Senator James Inhofe in his Senate office to discuss a new report his office will release today, ahead of an appearance by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson at an Energy and Public Works Committee hearing. Jackson once dismissed the Climategate scandal of the East Anglia CRU as nothing more than a demonstration that some climate scientists “lack interpersonal skills.” An initial inquiry by the minority members of the EPW Committee comes to a much different conclusion — that the e-mails reveal unethical and potentially criminal activities within the IPCC:

• Obstructing release of damaging data and information;
• Manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions;
• Colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science “consensus”; and
• Assuming activist roles to influence the political process.

The new report will also include in its findings the scandals of the bogus claims on Himalayan glacier retreat, Amazon rain forest damage, and African crop projections.  The latest scandal hit too late for this initial inquiry report, which was the withdrawal of IPCC claims on rising sea levels (via Watts Up With That):

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results“. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.

Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper’s estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.

Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: “It’s one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science.” He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study’s conclusion.

The IPCC has insisted that their report consisted of solid, peer-reviewed science that was unassailable.  Over the last three months, we have seen repeated exposures of advocacy and unsupported student theses masquerading as science, as well as evidence of conspiracies to silence skeptics and ruin their careers.  This paper was the first ever retracted from Nature Geoscience in three years of publication.

Most of you know I’m on vacation for a few days, but I’m still in DC, and I jumped at the chance to get the interview with Inhofe. I should add that just before our interview last night, two administrators from the EPA arrived at Inhofe’s Senate office just before me. Inhofe later told me that the pair informed him that they wanted to proceed full steam ahead with their endangerment finding and the enforcement efforts they had planned. Inhofe expressed surprise that the EPA hadn’t reconsidered its position after the exposure of the IPCC’s incompetence and potential fraud — and he plans to demand answers from Jackson today.

Inhofe will have the report at his website later today, so be sure to download it when you can.  Meanwhile, here is my exclusive interview with one of the men who have warned for years — since at least 2005, according to numerous quotes provided by Inhofe’s office — that the IPCC was promulgating a religious belief more than a science.  In the second half of the interview, Inhofe discusses the aims of the AGW movement, which has less to do with changing the weather than with expanding government control of private property and enterprise.

Update: Pajamas Media has an exclusive early look at the report. (via Drudge)