A long time ago, when I was first learning about the sciences,

one of the things that was pointed out in the textbooks and by the teacher, over and over was that there was a process you went through with an idea. Each step had to be gone through and if- at any point- your idea was found to be wrong, you dumped it. If it was a little off from the facts you dug to make sure of the facts, and you changed your theory to fit the facts; you never diddled with the facts because you couldn't stand the idea of changing your theory, because that way lay nothing but bad. You would be found untrustworthy, anyone who had gone down a blind alley or screwed other research around by trusting your reports would never let it be forgotten, your name would be Mud; and for good reason. To borrow a bit,
This is really all about trust. If Professor A. Einstein publishes E=mc², the fact that the publication has been peer reviewed, the publication includes enough detail that you feel confident it could be replicated, and the results are then subject to challenge means that you can trust what’s in the publication. “Science” is a social contract — an agreement that allows scientists to trust what they’re told by their fellows.
and
We’re only beginning to analyze and understand the full implications of these emails and the associated data. Among other things, however, these emails suggest that a number of highly reputable climate scientists had been conniving for years to prevent other researchers from obtaining the data needed to replicate climate science results. At the same time, these scientists appear to have colluded to subvert the whole peer review process in order to prevent critical or contradictory results from being published.

This violates the whole social contract that is the basis of what we call science.

This mess has done more than that; it may pretty much destroy the trust a lot of people had in science. A lot of politicians have been using this research to work at forcing Cap & Trade down our throats with all the increase in government power and loss of freedom that's part of it. And the cost; I'd say 'billions', but when you look at down the road that's far too small a number for what this would cost. And in the name of helping politicians seize even more control of our lives many scientists were quite willing to corrupt the system. Unfortunately, the crap revealed in the documents from CRU is only part of it: we've heard and read the attempts by other people, some of them scientists who're supposed to know better, to trash anyone who dares to disagree with the theory, to try to destroy careers and lives. Often by 'scientists' who hid data that, by law, was supposed to be available for review, for one example of violation of the method.

This has damaged, maybe destroyed, trust in the peer-reviewed journals(what was still there); when you have hard evidence of them working with the True Believers to suppress dissent from the favored idea, why would you trust them again? At the least, every editor who had a hand in these actions needs to go; they've shown they cannot be trusted to honestly oversee the process.

And I come back to the control these bastards sought over our lives. They've been helping the bureaucrats and politicians who want control over us in every way, aiding them in reducing our choices, in raising taxes, in controlling our transport and food and heating and cooling and everything else in the Holy Name of Stopping Global Warming, using faked information and falsified charts and hysteria.

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being "confused" by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.
Let's not forget the lives that will be lost in developing countries because they couldn't be allowed the power that makes clean water and ways to cook other than charcoal or dried dung and lights for the night.

Right now you've got clowns like Monbiot trying hard to say "It's only some work by a few people affected by these e-mails", which is bullshit but he's trying hard; so are others. They would rather see people dead and lives destroyed to protect their tin god AGW than confess there just might be a problem with it.

The one thing that really makes this mess different than some other scientific frauds of the past is people can look at this and see what's already been done to their lives because of it, and see what damage is still hanging, waiting to fall, that was based on this crap. Maybe that'll help get it cleaned up. And the mess shoved right up the ass of people like Waxman who tried to use AGW as a club on us.