The best commentary by far is here:
http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/
Some things you can only say with satire.

UEA’s response- I completely understand it. The emails show nothing sinister to anyone who understands the context, but some of them are embarrassing (opinions about people that I’m sure the authors did not want made public etc).

If the hacker had released the emails that they thought showed dodgy practices that would have been one thing, but releasing hundreds of random private emails is just an attempt at crass, vindictive (and criminal) bullying. Refusing to engage with it may be bad PR, but it is perfectly understandable. If someone put my private mail on the internet and then proceded to read mad conspiracies into it I would eat cold vomit before going on the telly to try to explain it. (Especially when Morano was also going to be invited on at the same time to shout lies and abuse at me)

They don’t delete comments. They just hold them in queue before someone can respond. And whats wrong with that? Denialist climate blogs DELETE non-conforming posts. Realclimate doesn’t. They just give themselves the opportunity to respond.

cheers

I find myself being drawn to comment because I think these issues matter greatly. Usually I just lurk and read and try to learn and understand. To understand where I am coming from I should state that my major was philosophy (tripled the required hours as I found it rather interesting – this was back in the days when they were not so interested and obsessed with processing you through from start to finish as quickly as possible, so such was not so extraordinary…) with minors in poly-sci and business. Almost everyone else in the family majored in things much more mathematically related, including an uncle with a PhD in physics. Thus I have generally been able to find someone to help where I get lost… My professional career for the past 15 years has been IT – networking and such (I was not fond of my programming classes – in fact I really hated them – Fortran! so I will leave the code reviews going on to those better able to follow it, though I can states for such comments as have been found to be in the read me files is greatly disturbing…).

There are a lot of comments about the peer review process. For anyone to state there are not issues with such is to be less then fully honest. Even in this thread there are comments about “making sure rubbish isn’t published” – though that actually was not the original intent of peer review. The question of rubbish was supposed to be AFTER publishing, where the traditional work of scientists testing and retesting others experiments and theories play out over time. It is supposed to insure relevance to the area the journal covered, ensure it wasn’t simply a rehash of previous work and catch glaring issues and obvious mistakes – though, again, anyone being honest will acknowledge much still makes it through the process as most reviewers are not going to go try to test everything presented in the paper – but then that is not what a review is for. It was assuredly never intended to play the role of gatekeeper (such leads to the reinforcement of paradigms, not the advancement of thought and understanding).

My wife is an attorney, and a couple years ago we went to a conference (concerning environmental issues – which I now find quite ironic) where “peer review” became the lunch break topic of conversation. The conversation was substantially less then flattering in regards to reliability from the legal practitioners prospective. I will try to get her to post a comment on the issues that were raised when she gets back later today. I think such thoughts might be worth pondering in the current debate.

It is interesting to note however that “peer review” was rarely seen as being of great importance outside of medicine prior to the mid 1950’s, and has over the past 20 years seemed to have become the only “accepted” method of “serious” academic publication (Einstein would have been in serious trouble had the current dogma been in place…). I saw this myself between my undergraduate studies 20+ years ago and my graduate studies (a far different field then my undergraduate studies – grad school was in education) a couple years back. The change between the two was radical and extreme – and it made finding acceptable citations for alternative views for my masters work almost imposable to find (though I also must say critical thought over the theories presented was less then encouraged…).
Thus I find the whole thump the table and scream “peer review” to be somewhat disingenuous, at best.

Say what you will about the e-mails, the data is already being mined and it is far more damning then the e-mails. I’d suggest you start looking at the sites that have begun tearing into that (and not just the harry read me file, though that too is quite a mind boggling display of “we don’t know what our programs are actually doing” (said as one who works in IT and has for the past 15 years) – and act like a logical person instead of a “true believer” – nothing in science should ever be considered “finished” and beyond debate, and it would be nice to see this course of investigation brought back into the bounds of science and removed from the areas of theology.

I’d suggest that this defense is shameful to the extreme, especially given the contents of the e-mails. You’re going to have to do a whole lot better than this to stifle the tidal wave this is causing.

I guess we shall all know much more after the investigations (and I mean congressional investigations & criminal investigations) are through somewhere down the road. The depths of the political and social fallout from this seems to still be going over all the “true believers” heads.

I was somewhat critical – I’m no longer on the fence. The whole enterprise needs to be reevaluated with truly open and honest scientific debate & work, starting with a full disclosure of the historical data.

These guys do not live in the politicised world; they are straight scientists surrounded by a culture which has mostly accepted CC since the 1980’s. After all, all anyone need do is look out of a window and see the changes. CC is accepted.

On the other hand, “deniers” are people who live 4,000 miles away – most UEA people will literally have never have met a denier. They will not know what “swiftboat” means and will have no inkling of the import of what they do – as seen from the US. And they are not into politics. CC is not a political ball here.

Going after UEA staff is like hunting the dodo – who had never met humans and don’t know it’s time to run away. UEA guys will have no experience of dealing with the situation and will have no means to judge the impact of what they do (or don’t do) in far off lands. It’s just not on their radar.

As in the Briffa non-scandal, there is no proof whatsoever that the science supporting AGW is incorrect nor that there is a vast conspiracy.

It is a shame that the general public is being mislead by the Singers, Moranos, Milloys, Moncktons, etc. on what is likely to be the most important issue of the 21st century.

Instrad of proposing that the UEA scientists buck up their PR, surely you should be telling them to resign? Do you have no moral fible?