Climate science has taken place in a state of seige. Some people may have done some minor things wrong, but could it possibly NOT affect you when whatever you do is grabbed by dishonest people and misrepresented all over the internet?

What Was Actually Revealed

* a rehash of a well-known controversy about how to present tree-ring data
* frustration about too much attention to substandard scientific papers slipped into the literature by marginally qualified people with nonscientific agendas, and discussions about how to handle that
* frustration about opposition by filibuster via freedom of information requests
* a single suggestion about “deleting emails”, without any context, which plausibly does not refer to deleting emails from a server (scientists are probably aware that end users cannot really do this) but rather to deleting them from a response to one of many FOIA requests
* some sloppy code and a pretty sad but perfectly typical lack of understanding of the advantages of dynamic programming languages
* a couple of fudge factors explicitly labeled as such probably used in testing, commented out
* some older data for which CRU is not the originator or primary repository is not in any known dataset at CRU
* about 985 emails and 1995 other files of no apparent interest to anyone

In other words, (withe the possible exception of the email deletion incident, which I imagine the lawyers are fretting about) the only things remotely unusual here are a direct consequence of the existence of a politically rather than scientifically motivated opposition.

From: http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2009/12/bug-report.html

I found the whole episode morbidly depressing. Mass hysteria and a whole conspiracy narrative created around– basically nothing at all.

On this George Monbiot sadly has a lot to answer for. He really hasn’t helped. He read something which he didn’t understand and panicked. He should have known better, or at least he should retract it now.

Josie