If you’ve been following my delicious links (which you probably haven’t, at least until I started posting them here, too) you might remember The Dog Ate Global Warming, a story about how key climate data seems to have been “misplaced” by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, maintainers of several key data series supporting the global warming hypothesis.

Now emails and other internal documents from the CRU have been leaked (and there are various theories about how they got out). CRU supporters (such as RealClimate.org) try to deflect criticism by predicting that

…the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. […] Instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context.

(Try this listing of excerpts at Examiner.com for a taste of those cherry-picked phrases. Sounds pretty bad to me.)

Others (such as (Lord) Nigel Lawson) read the documents as revealing that

(a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

I’ve been trying to find some place that actually summarizes the situation but I guess it’s too early for that. In the meantime, Watts Up With That? and Climate Audit Mirror seem like good threads to follow.