The climate researchers at the center of last year's scandal over hacked emails were cleared Tuesday of any deliberate scientific malpractice by an independent panel of academics.

The review found the scientists were "dedicated if slightly disorganized." But it did question their statistical methods, saying it was "very surprising" that they hadn't worked more closely with professional statisticians in their work.

The inquiry panel, chaired by Ron Oxburgh, former chair of the House of Lords science and technology committee, was set up by the University of East Anglia to look at the research produced by scientists at its Climatic Research Unit.

The conclusions could help to restore the damaged credibility of the CRU, which was embroiled in scandal last year when thousands of private emails were hacked from its computers and published online. Some of the emails suggested efforts to squelch the views of scientists who question the link between human activity and climate change.

(This story and related background material will be available on The Wall Street Journal Web site, WSJ.com.)

The Lord Oxburgh report is the second of three inquiries into the scandal to report its findings. A more expansive review announced by UEA late last year, which will examine whether its researchers manipulated information about global warning, is due to arrive in the next few weeks.

Last month, a committee of the UK 's House of Commons, which carried out its own investigation, concluded there was no evidence that the CRU improperly manipulated scientific work but criticized the UEA for failing to tackle a "culture of withholding information."

In January, Britain 's information commissioner's office said the UEA broke the law by failing to comply with requests under the UK 's Freedom of Information Act to release scientific data to outside researchers.

Meanwhile, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary, the local police force, are also conducting a criminal investigation into the data breach at the UEA that enabled the CRU's emails to be leaked.

The University of East Anglia welcomed Tuesday's report. "The veracity of CRU's research remains intact after this examination," it said. "It is gratifying to us that the Oxburgh Report points out that CRU has done a public service of great value by carrying out meticulous work on temperature records when it was unfashionable and attracted little scientific interest," it said. It also welcomed the report's criticisms, especially its recommendations that scientists engage more fully with the wider statistics community.

Other scientists said they weren't surprised at the Oxburgh panel's conclusions. "The fact is that several other groups compiling their own temperature data have reached very similar conclusions about global warming to CRU's, and that makes their results much more robust," said Prof. Fortunat Joos, professor of climate and environmental physics at the University of Berne, Switzerland.

The Oxburgh probe was aimed at assessing the integrity of the CRU's research, and focused mainly on 11 publications by the unit's researchers that cover a period of more than 20 years.

In some of these, the scientists used tree-ring data over thousands of years to gain information about past climates. The panel also looked at the unit's main contribution to climate science--its work in collecting and collating land-temperature records from all over the world.

Their report said the panel had seen "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit...Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention."

The panel wasn't given the task of looking at how the CRU dealt with data requests but it said there was "a host of important unresolved questions" arising from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context. It also said there were "important and unresolved questions" relating to the availability of environmental data sets and criticized the UK government for charging for access to such data.

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