"scientists that have published hundreds of peer reviewed papers" - As anyone who has tried to get their grant money will tell you, most of those papers are institutionally funded, creating selection bias for the results. Those scientists in the community who put forth a hypothesis challenging AGW are ostracized, and, in some cases, actively targeted for their beliefs - the recent email archive revelations show a fairly consistent thread with regards to that.

Environmental Science has become (and perhaps always has been) politicized. It's not the pure world like relativity, or quantum/particle physics, where there is a passionate desire (and even support, and funding) to find something that might contradict established beliefs/theories.

I suspect there is actually a hierarchy of science beliefs that looks like:

    Political         Environmental Science
    Less Political    Evolutionary Science
    Apolitical        Particle Physics

(Apologies to the 2% of HN that questions genomes/fossil records. :-)

Used to be you could trust scientists to be pure - alas no more.

So one email from over 10 years ago from one scientist without the full context of what was going on and all of environmental science is discredited? For ever?

Who is really being political here?

Luckily, science will not stop because you say it should.

You are missing my point - if anything, I am almost a pure-play scientific hypothesis/experiment/observations/results fanatic. I cringe every time I hear scientific naysayer attack the institution of science.

But, with that said, I am much more skeptical about environmental science than I would be about topics that are somewhat less politicized, such as Eötvös torsion balance experiments - and even _they_ turned out to have suspect results in hindsight.

And it wasn't the email regarding the "hiding" of data I was referring to - it was the several _hundred_ where the various scientists discussed how to discredit or otherwise shut down those who stood in opposition to the popular environmental theories.

I'm all for setting up the experiment and letting the results speak for themselves.

Experimental results can't speak for themselves. They are experiments. Only people can speak and weave stories, and only stories will move a population to action. This is the reality of communicating with human beings.

Marketing is the practical application of the science of sociology.

In light of recent events, I find a blanket appeal to "peer reviewed literature" unsatisfying.

Really? Are you referring to the recently leaked emails from the CRU? Because, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, emails aren't peer-reviewed literature.

Also, the nice thing about the peer-reviewed literature is that it is published. Anybody can read it and point out inherent flaws. Indeed, if you can identify a serious problem in a paper, and back your discovery with facts, you'll have no problem getting your counter-point published. There are literally tens of thousands of examples of precisely this happening available for your perusal, in the peer-reviewed literature!

It's not like major polluters, such as oil companies, don't have the bankroll to fund scientists to demonstrate that the claims about climate change are false. Their continued silence is like the dog that didn't bark in Conan-Doyle's "Silver Blaze"

The emails showed that a group of very influencial scientists were going to great lengths to prevent critical review and access to data.

I am unable to judge the impact of that kind of obstruction on their actual scientific argument. It could well be that the significance of the so called climategate is way overblown.

But it's definately not confidence inspiring behaviour by scientists who have so much to gain from a global warming panic.

Again, maybe I have misunderstood, but I'm under the impression that nearly all of the data in question is publicly available elsewhere (from original sources, as the CRU hasn't generated that much data itself, it relies on organisations the world over to pass their data on). A figure of about 2% has been cited for data that wasn't available elsewhere, but I am not aware of the validity of this figure - we'll have to await the results of the current review to know the real figure. Furthermore, the current claim is that that remaining undisclosed data is not undisclosed for nefarious purposes, but simply because it is data collected by commercial entities that have not granted the CRU the right to redistribute the data. That's another thing for which we will have to wait for the review to know the real story.

As for preventing critical review, I am unaware of any such activity. Do you have a citation?

What I am expressing is my general perception of the intentions conveyed in the published CRU emails. In order to provide citations I would have to go back and re-read them to collect all the bits and pieces that led me to my conclusions. I'm too busy with other things to do that.

One thing I consider preventing critical review is the lies about the original temperature readings that were thrown away in the 80s. The only plausible reason for lying about that is to make it easier for them to defend their own conclusions and make it more difficult for critics to check for errors.

But as I said many times before, I'm not one of those who claim to have found some kind of unambiguous smoking gun in those emails or code comments. Not about the science proper anyway. It seems to me that there is an attempt to hide something but I'm not quite sure what that is and whether it's of major consequence to the science itself.

The data available is insufficient to reproduce the work of climate change research centers, which is the whole point of any criticism and the motivation behind FOIA requests that scientists illegally acted to obstruct.

It is impossible to prove that climate change will occur and is man made. The only way to do that would be to do the experiment: find a planet, pump lots of C02 into its atmosphere and measure the result. Of course you would have to do this a number of times with different planets using some as controls.

However science can estimate from small scale experiments and theoretical calculations a probability that global warming is man-made and its likely effects. Even if the probability of a catastrophe is small, say 5%, it is still worth spending a small percent of GDP to prevent or to ameliorate it. It's like if you own a house you would be an idiot not to spend good money on fire insurance even though the probability of your house burning down is very small.