Climate-quidick

Why "quidick" and not "Gate" - well "WaterGate" as you will recall was infamous in that the mainstream press investigated a story and brought down a President. Thus if this were about the mainstream press investigating CRU and the released mails, Gate would be appropriate, but it's not. It's about the news getting out in spite of the mainstream media. Much closer to the infamous Chappaquidick controversy (if you are too young to remember that then don't worry since if you don't remember I'm sure you were never taught about it. At this point all of the main actors are dead, so it's just a name.)

As the climate controversy rises I found a good scientific discussion of just the legal concerns of the recent climage data release is at: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/11/in-climate-hack.html

Some have said that this whole mess isn't about the data which is "good" or "sound" Well as for the "quality" of the data, here is an analysis I like:
"As someone with a background both in IT and in science (I participated in particle physics experiments as a physics PhD student), I would also add the following lesson to the folks writing scientific code: Don't make stuff up. The released document HARRY_READ_ME.txt contains examples in which the coder, supremely frustrated with the poor quality of his data, simply creates some. Even if the underlying science is sound, "created" data taints the integrity of the entire process. Don't do it, no matter how tempting." (bolding mine) source here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141481/Data_leak_lessons_learned_from_the_Climategate_hack?taxonomyId=

Of course my personal opinion matches this one:
"One of the reasons AGW flimflam angers me is that it crowds out sane, constructive environmentalism. An environmental lobby that really cared about saving the planet would be agitating for crash programs to replace the burning of fossil fuels with nuclear energy; buying up rainforest acreage to stem loss of biodiversity; funding research into better battery- and supercap-based storage technology so low-density renewable power sources could be aggregated into baseload power. But the envorinmentalists we have won’t do these things, because they’re fixated on the wrong problems and the wrong means of solving even those."

I'll even expand on this and state that the blowback as this issue gains more exposure and the outright lies and manipulation by those who just want power come out is that the real environmental movement has been set back 20+ years. That env. damage I already linked to in China just being the tip of the iceberg as places like Indonesia, Brazil, and others keep pace with China.

The source of that quote is a technologist: Eric S. Raymond, author of "The Cathedral & the Bazaar". He has an excellent analysis of just how corrupt the data is and how it was literally faking a hockey stick on his blog (read the top 3 or 4 posts but don't miss "Hiding the Decline: Part 1") http://esr.ibiblio.org/ That's where a software specialist show the code that literally embeds the hockey stick into whatever data get's inserted...