Watts Up With That has a statement

from the American Meteorological Society on the CRU documents. I'm going to quote one part:
The AMS Statement on Climate Change continues to represent the position of the AMS. It was developed following a rigorous procedure that included drafting and review by experts in the field, comments by the membership, and careful review by the AMS Council prior to approval as a statement of the Society. The statement is based on a robust body of research reported in the peer-reviewed literature. As with any scientific assessment, it is likely to become outdated as the body of scientific knowledge continues to grow, and the current statement is scheduled to expire in February 2012 if it is not replaced by a new statement prior to that.
Except we now have proof that the 'peer-reviewed' literature wasn't really; it was screwed with to give the results the Believers wanted. Which means the AMS statement is at least in part based on faked data and slanted reviews. But they either don't have the guts to say "This screws up our previous understanding and we're going to have to go back over things", or it's a case of "We Believe, and this evidence isn't going to change that. We want to change your life to deal with the Global Warming we Believe in, and we're not budging on that."


I'm also borrowing this chart from another of his posts:
The way the scientific method is supposed to work. Please note the blocks 'Repeat(by self) Reproduce(by others) and what's supposed to happen if 'Inconsistent with Hypothesis'.

From the post:
"One of the foundational components of the scientific method is the idea of reproducibility (Popper 1959). In order for an experiment to be considered valid it must be replicated. This process begins with the scientists who originally performed the experiment publishing the details of the experiment. This description of the experiment is then read by another group of scientists who carry out the experiment, and ascertain whether the results of the new experiment are similar to the original experiment. If the results are similar enough then the experiment has been replicated. This process validates the fact that the experiment was not dependent on local conditions, and that the written description of the experiment satisfactorily records the knowledge gained through the experiment. From Rand and Wilensky 2006
CRU’s decision to withhold data and code from public inspection is not only against the scientific method, given the impact their work has on governmental policies and taxpayer funded programs, it is, in my opinion, unethical. – Anthony Watts"

and in a guest post by Willis Eschenbach(you really need to read it all):
People seem to be missing the real issue in the CRU emails. Gavin over at realclimate keeps distracting people by saying the issue is the scientists being nasty to each other, and what Trenberth said, and the Nature “trick”, and the like. Those are side trails. To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency.

Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.