Comments in the code like “shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” look particularly damning, and seem to support the idea of “hide the decline.”

The response should be to release all the data, and all the program code, and let the skeptics have a field day with it. Then, those that are challenging the conventional wisdom will have to put up or shut up, and in the process the rest of us … who are going to pay for the end result one way or the other … will get the full story.

Every group effort is going to include some measure of this when both politics and emotion are so heavily involved. But by and large, I support continued scientific inquiry from a range of researcher as they continue to find out more and more about the nature and extent of recent warming trends. And the extent of our role in these trends.

As mentioned, there is disagreement about the growth rates, and that is a HUGE issue when it comes to making projections. Among the folks that disagree, they need to remind themselves that projections are at best educated guesses, and then behave accordingly. (Like by not calling someone an idiot because you think their estimate is way off.)

We need to keep studying and keep watching our climate. And we need to at least make the sorts of changes to our behavior that are virtues all by themselves, like conserving energy and developing alternative energy sources. Even if folks disagree about something like cap and trade, we can still agree on other things that are wise and prudent.

Conservation is just taking care not to waste resources. This can often be done with minimal effort. That makes it a virtue all by itself, especially if efforts focus on designing plans to treat the individual efforts of folks as a precious resource not to be wasted. (For example, single stream recycling blows away individual sorting). And fostering alt energy just makes sense on the basis of knowing that we have a finite supply of fossil fuel.

No brainers and low-hanging fruit first.

It’s also pretty clear this group is the most extreme group out there. They think the UN estimates are too low and they say so.

So unless there’s some scientist who’s really good at sneaky stuff, going around pretending to be less extreme than these guys but secretly conspiring to make them look good, I think this is probably the worst anybody’s doing.

And it’s not exactly evil stuff. “Starving” a Journal is a boycott, and they tried to get a journal editor fired because they thought he’s an incompetent idiot. Heck what do you think the anti-global warming crowd would do if one of their periodical printed an article implying that global warming could be a small problem, and that fixing it won’t cost that much? They’d demand the staff resign in protest (“starving” the periodical), and call for the head of anyone involved with the decision to print the article.

And it’s not like such an article would be unsupported by science. Oil is $75 a barrel, therefore it’s probably a good idea to invest in technologies that use less of it. In investments there are up-front costs, but they eventually pay for themselves. That’s the point.

It could be that “the decline” in temps are known to the participants to be an anomaly caused by the way the data is put together, and the author of the email is using shorthand to address the problem. “Correcting” the data, or “fixing” the data would make more sense to use.

Having been a party to discovery in a lawsuit that involved gathering up emails referring to a specific issue, I know that people treat email as conversation rather than “memos”. It can be shocking to read email conversations, where innocent remarks can seem damning.

Probably the most illuminating thing to come out of the emails so far is the attempt to stifle dissent. We like to think of science as open and fair, but it has been shown to be anything but historically, and climate science is no exception. The “conspiracy” to get an editor fired, and to “starve” a journal of articles shows how dedicated the researchers are to getting their message out and suppressing what they feel is “bad science”. The question of how much they would do remains in our minds.