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.