Loads of people have already dealt with this far better than I ever could, notably Bishop Hill and the Devils Kitchen. The response over at Real climate is also quite enlightening, especially as they feature in some of the hacked emails (Oh and claim to be independent of any environmental organizations) .
So go and read what these more informed people have to say, in the mean time I’m going to address just two points which come up in the defence of the scientists on Real climate. Firstly there is the claim that it’s all out of context and it’s vital that scientists e-mails are never seen for fear it will hamper their discussions. Apparently the fact that in business you have to assume that courts may see your mail is irrelevant, as in business I assume they believe that you don’t need a free and open exchange of ideas. This is really just so much nonsense, historically the amount of private correspondence between scientists that has been published as well as “private” notebooks is huge. Also obviously if they’re being funded by the tax payers then all of their work belongs to the tax payer, and how do you misinterpret people saying they’d rather delete a file that release it due to a FOI request? As we’re so often told if they’ve nothing to hide they’ve nothing to fear.
More worryingly from a scientific point of view is the huge and obvious reluctance to share their data and models with other people. Only allowing peer review by select and (presumably) friendly/sympathetic peers is not the way to do good science. The hypocrisy of claiming that they need to be able to speak freely to advance science whilst at the same time looking for ways to avoid sharing their work and data with other academics and talking about hiding behind IPR is somewhat shocking (well it would be if it was new).
The one thing, which I think the revealed data does show is that the science for significant man made climate change is nowhere near as solid as we’re led to believe. The robust debate for which hiding data is vital, isn’t allowed to reach us mere mortals despite the changes that are being insisted on to combat models which are still the matter of such robust debate and seemingly such suspect data. The way that bits of data sets are seemingly casually discarded when they no longer fit the favoured model is quite worrying, why should say tree data suddenly become unreliable? If there’s good evidence of some external change affecting that data fair enough, but if it’s suspect after point X with no such external change why isn’t it also suspect before then. It’s details such as this which I think go beyond “ambiguous at worst”
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