Mike Hulme has sent some comments on Climategate to the Andy Revkin's Dot Earth column at the New York Times.
The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the IPCC does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.
This is a surprising statement from Hulme, who is heavily implicated in the CRU emails.
1. He was part of a group that organised a letter to the Times, ostensibly written by climatologists but actually drafted by Greenpeace (0872202064).
2. He appears to have changed confidence intervals in a presentation at the behest of WWF.(0933254004)
3. He appears to have been instrumental in the plot to oust von Storch from Climate Research (1051190249)
See this email from Michael Mann on the affair (1057941657):
I think that the community should, as Mike H has previously suggested ... terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels -- reviewing, editing, and submitting, and leave it to wither way into oblivion and disrepute,