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Since you refuse to look at the evidence for yourself, the eight major investigations that cleared CRU of any scientific misconduct include:

  - House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact"

  - Independent Climate Change Review: "we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt."

  - International Science Assessment Panel: "We found absolutely no evidence of impropriety whatsoever"

  - Pennsylvania State University first panel and second panel: "Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community"

  - United States Environmental Protection Agency: CRU critics came to "faulty scientific conclusions" and "resorted to hyperbole."

  - Department of Commerce: "We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures"

- National Science Foundation: "We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence."

Accusations of this were made several times and denied but someone hacked into the email servers and released a bunch of email showing them discussing withholding the information. Now it is said that the original raw data does not exist any more nor does the methods and processes used to correct irregularities of it.

Interesting, but the first link shows that CRU scientists would be lousy lawyers, and the second is unrelated to CRU completely. And now for a dose of facts about the CRU affair:

The British House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee investigated the matter and concluded: "Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that 'global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity'."

The Independent Climate Change Email Review team investigated the matter and concluded: "On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

Lord Oxburgh’s independent panel investigated the matter and found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever"

The US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the matter and stated that they "reviewed every e-mail and found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets. Four other independent reviews came to similar conclusions."

And so on and so on. Should I continue? More or less, the worst thing anyone in possession of facts has to say about the CRU scientists is that they suck at communicating. Bummer, but not an uncommon one.

Now, I know you are a global warming pusher

No, I'm not a global warming pusher, CO2 is a global warming pusher. I have no interest in contributing to global warming.

and have your own beliefs but this is not about you in the slightest.

No, it isn't. It's about you and presumably some other people apparently being unable to grasp basic principles of reasoning. Even if if you found out evidence of gross academic misconduct having happened within CRU (which didn't happen), it still wouldn't prove anything about global warming (or the lack of it). If you find flaws in a study saying "P", it doesn't mean you've proven "not P". All you have at that moment is an empty set of proven claims. And if you have ten independent studies of global warming, all of them saying the Earth is warming, every study having independent data, research, and people involved, and one of the people or teams is found to have made anything invalidating that one study - anything from flawed methodology through measurement errors to even outright scientific fraud, it demonstrates nothing about those other studies. All it demonstrates is that from the one flawed study in question, no conclusion can be made about the subject in either direction. Arguing otherwise would be an argument from fallacy, which is a formal fallacy in its own right.

"Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so." [Muir Russell Review, p48,53]

Alternately, if you actually read those emails then you should be armed with precise quotes of the "deceptions and manipulations" which you found so powerfully convincing, or at least have some mental construct of their findings to provide us, rather than just a brief handwave in their direction preparatory to an ad hominem slur devoid of substantive content.

As, for instance, these quotes from 7 unrelated investigations which I find convincing:

"even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified."
-"The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia" http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/387i.pdf

"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal. "
- "Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit." http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP

"Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community."
- "Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E. Mann" http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf

"On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. ... In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."
- "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review" http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

"Petitioners say that emails disclosed from CRU provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate data. The media coverage after the emails were released was based on email statements quoted out of context and on unsubstantiated theories of conspiracy. The CRU emails do not show either that the science is flawed or that the scientific process has been compromised. EPA carefully reviewed the CRU emails and found no indication of improper data manipulation or misrepresentation of results."
- "Myths vs. Facts: Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act" http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/myths-facts.html

"In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures. In addition, we found no evidence to suggest that NOAA was non-compliant with the IQA or the Shelby Amendment. "
- "Examination of issues related to internet posting of emails from Climatic Research Unit" http://www.oig.doc.g

Can you please at least agree that this looks very bad. "We've got data that proves bla-bla, now agree to Kyoto and pay trillions !", "Okay, let's see that data", "no you can't have you'll just use it to discredit our cause".

Can you explain why it would be such a bad thing to give climate skeptics full access to the data ? Why wouldn't that be a very good thing ?

Sorry, but you've basically fallen for a deception. In reality, climate science is one of the most open fields of science in providing access to raw data, and there is (and has been for years) easily enough data available to check the conclusions of climate science. Indeed, one of the investigatory commissions formed after the "Climate Research Unit" email theft was able to independently obtain the data and replicate CRUs conclusions with no difficulty.

What really happened was this: CRU does acquire data and does not own any raw data. They analyzed data provided form National Weather Services, but they do not archive this data, did not have permission to distribute it, and had no reason to retain copies after they were done with it. Some climate "skeptics" demanded the data from CRU, and CRU told them that CRU did not have the data available to distribute, and that they should request the data from the owners, and refused to cooperate further. Filtered through the "climate science skeptic" propaganda machine, this became "Climate scientists are hiding (or in some versions, destroying) the data!!!" CRU was not wholly without fault in the matter (they could have been more cooperative without violating their scientific and ethical obligations toward the owners of the data). But it is entirely a myth that the data to check whether the world is warming is unavailable. It is available, and it has been checked and rechecked by multiple independent groups.

All the links I checked work fine. There is no "single most important link." In climate science, as in any field of science, no important conclusion is critically dependent upon any single data set.

Anybody can file a FOIA request over anything, so the existence of a FOIA demand proves nothing. Many of the FOIA demands were for data that labs in question did not even own (for example, CRU does not own any primary data. Some were over agreements with data providers rather than data.

The BEST results are not even published yet. But they are only the latest group to examine the data and conclude that global warming is real. All of the data are available from the National Weather Services that acquired and own it (although some of them charge a fee for access). The Muir Russell review even went so far as to request the original data from the actual owners and reproduce CRU's conclusions.

Take a deep breath, and try to process the entire CCE findings. You can just read the executive summary, which is chapter 1, from which you have cherry-picked a single statement, and implied that somehow the CCE thinks there is some substance to the climategate charges.

For some hint on why climate scientists might be defensive, watch this video, which includes footage of Michael Mann reading death threats that were sent to him, and also shows how death threats are incited. Keep that in mind.

Denial is part of the human condition, and in particular, is driven by the confirmation bias, as negative emotions that stop you from placing your mind on disconcerting information.

Read the whole executive summary, take a deep breath, read it again, and then tell me that there is some substance to the climategate charges.

There's nothing particularly "stunning" about the conclusion that modern average global temperatures are higher than temperatures measured or deduced in the last several hundred years.

What was stunning about it was that all the proxy variation and variation between the three sources was wiped out at the splice points, and a remarkably consistent picture of all three graphs rising in dramatic fashion was shown instead.

The aren't "blended." They are identified and separately labeled, as you can see from the actual graph in question (p. 3)

You're looking at the wrong graph. The graph that Phil Jones was talking about was this one, supplied for a WMO report.

While there was some talk about erasing mail, there is no evidence that any mail was actually erased. (Hardly surprising...if they'd actually erased the email, surely they would have also erased the email suggesting that they erase emails) So apparently, cooler heads prevailed.

The leaked email was taken from a backup server. Phil Jones also said he deleted email: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all."

  We also know that Jones explicitly told his colleagues to erase email:

"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't
have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

Are you going to keep on making up excuses for this? The fact that he sent that email is bad enough.

Which data are you talking about?

It's in the review I cited earlier:

"For some years prior to the coming into force of the general right of access to information under FoIA, CRU had received requests for data, including station identifiers. An example of the attitude to these requests is given in the following e-mail extract:

Jones to Mann on 2nd February 2005 (1107454306.txt):
"And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it !""

What they wanted was all the data so they could verify how they came up with their results. This includes raw data as well as any meta-data and derived data, along with any code.

Apologists: Ignore intentional deceit, withholding of data, and a conspiracy to erase email, all of which was admonished in the CCE review. Act indignant when called out on it.

There's definitely a lot of noise, but it's not all one-sided.

Go back and look at the investigative reports again. They said nothing about the "hide the decline" graphs.

Wrong: http://www.cce-review.org/

"In relation to "hide the decline" we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain -- ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text."

Finally got this comment through the filter after removing MANY of the links.

In a field where all you really have are climate data and computer models, refusing to share them with the world is akin to a physicist claiming that he’s invented Cold Fusion, but refusing to show exactly how (except perhaps to a couple of his friends). Gavin of course defended him saying that while maybe THEIR data wasn’t available, HIS data was available, and so that made it all better. (Which it didn’t – it rather just highlighted their shady behavior). ... [ShakaUVM]

Gavin wasn't just saying that other data was available, he was saying that CRU doesn't do any primary data collection:

... Claims that data has been destroyed or lost are untrue. Claims that there is no access to the raw temperature data are untrue. There is nothing in any of the CRU archives that is particularly special or noteworthy and that isn't mostly available to anyone already via NOAA. ... [Gavin Schmidt]

... If you want the very original hand-written records from individual stations, ask the National Met. Service in the relevant country, not the people who collate the homogenised records for use in tracking climate change. [Gavin Schmidt]

The raw data is in the custody of the met services who originated it. CRU is just a collation, not a temperature measuring organisation. [Gavin Schmidt]

No data has been destroyed, the original files and numbers are with the national weather services that provided them. Removing a copy of a original file because it is not useful for my purposes is not 'deleting data' [Gavin Schmidt]

The raw data is the GHCN data (v2.mean.Z) (publicly available, as has been the case for decades). [Gavin Schmidt]

Unsurprisingly, that's also what the reviews said:

The Unit does virtually no primary data acquisition but has used data from published archives and has collaborated with people who have collected data. ... [Oxburgh panel, p2]

The CRU dataset, which forms the land surface component of the HadCRUT global temperature record, was compiled with the aim of comprehensiveness. The majority of the data in it are derived from the same freely-available raw data sets used by NOAA and NASA. ... [UK House of Commons Inquiry, p13]

Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. ... Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so. [Muir Russell Review, p48,53]

Somehow, you managed to twist the fact that it was impossible for CRU to prevent access to the raw data into a

"The climategate scandal was really about climatologists hiding their data and methods from critical review."

I suppose you're going to tell me that the three independent inquries that exonerated Jones and the CRU (including the CRU investigation headed by the ex-chairman of Shell) were a whitewash. Look closely at the third one where it describes how the investigators were able to obtain the "hiden data" from public sources within two days. If you still belive the CRU was hiding anything after the thourough debunking of those claims then you haven't been paying attention.

..and some of it was.

No, it was not. Jones's group does not produce any data at all. The only thing they do is analyze data belonging to other people, data that, as the Muir Russell Report verified, is readily available from the actual owners. In addition, the inquiry reproduced the analysis of Jones's group based upon Jones's published description of their method, and concluded, "The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher....A researcher can evidently produce a study which would test the CRUTEM analysis quite precisely, without requiring any information from CRU to do so."

End of fucking story

As you say.

Ahhh, but now you show the weakness in McIntyre's methods, namely that by referring to keywords instead of arguments, it invites the casual reader to "fill in the blanks" with whatever their pre-conceived notions are. And by the snide tone that McIntyre uses, you are invited to fill in those blanks with something nefarious. Here, for the purposes of this post, you have filled in the blanks with something that sounds at first more reasonable.

The "hide the decline" and "divergence problem" issues are this: A method was developed to use tree ring data as a proxy for past temperatures for which we have no measured temperature records. The "decline" or "divergence problem" is that the method proved to be unreliable when used to "measure" temperatures in the present - the real temperature record went one way, and the tree ring data went another way.

However, I suspect you are guilty of omitting important issues from the discussion, specifically the existence of other types of temperature proxies, and their correlation with each other. Those who reconstruct pre-instrumental temperatures use numerous different methods, including corals, lake sediments, ocean sediments, ice core records, tree-rings, to name but a few. If those temperature proxies correlated to each other quite tightly for, say a thousand years, and then one of them, say the tree-ring proxy, suddenly diverged from the other proxies and from the instrumental temperatures, it would be reasonable to assume that something peculiarly recent was messing with the tree-rings.

The decline in the tree-ring proxy temperatures is no secret in the scientific community. Indeed there have been a number of papers that hypothesize reasons for the recent divergence of tree-ring proxy temperatures. A cursory search on scholar.google.com will support this assertion. And to quote the CCE report, "We find that divergence is well acknowledged in the literature, including CRU papers."

Great post!

"After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid." - Oxborgh report.

The Penn state inquiry does not directly address tree rings.

The Muir report, (why wasn't it linked in TFS?), says - "We have seen no evidence to sustain a charge of impropriety on the part of CRU staff (or the many other authors) in respect of selecting the reconstructions in AR4 Chapter 6. [snip] We find that divergence is well acknowledged in the literature, including CRU papers."

From the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review Final Report pdf:

On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a "trick" and to "hide the decline" in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was Misleading.

Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct. It may be commonplace, but that's no excuse.

Personally, that doesn't bother me much; science has always been politicized between factions who behave unethically in order to further their own theories. What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science.