Andy Revkin Decides to Let His Readers In ON Some of the Facts

It's a pretty decent effort, especially this portion:

Officials at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain say the disclosed material was copied from computers there in a “criminal breach.” (Some e-mail exchanges involved or described this reporter and other journalists).

On Friday, scientists at the university said the school was preparing to announce an inquiry, led by an independent panel, into the theft and related issues.

The most serious criticisms leveled at the authors of the e-mail messages revolve around three issues.

One is whether the correspondence reveals efforts by scientists to shield raw data, gleaned from tree rings and other indirect indicators of climate conditions, preventing it from being examined by independent researchers. Among those who say it does is Stephen McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant who has a popular skeptics’ blog, climateaudit.org. A second issue is whether disclosed documents, said to be from the stolen cache, prove that the data underlying climate scientists’ conclusions about warming are murkier than the scientists have said. The documents include files of raw computer code and a computer programmer’s years-long log documenting his frustrations over data gathered from countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

Finally, questions have been raised about whether the e-mail messages indicated that climate scientists tried to prevent the publication of papers written by climate skeptics, which were described by the scientists in the e-mail messages as “garbage” and “fraud.

The last part is the weakest, because it's not just about whether they tried to prevent publications of papers, but also attempted (successfully) to remove editors and destroy the reputations of peer review publications with whom they disagreed, while peer reviewing each other's papers and keeping a list of yes men.

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