It's a scandal of the first order with billions of dollars at stake. Scientists who are advocating the existence of global warming have been caught destroying data and performing all sorts of illegal and unethical practices in order to push their ideology. Those illegal acts include the destruction of emails that would avoid the Freedom of Information Act plus the attempt to blacklist scientific publications that didn't agree with their ideology. Obama's chief advisor on global warming is one of the perpetrators of this fraud on the scientific community and is directly implicated in the email destruction scandal.
The most significant data that was erased was that of the history of tree rings, which supported warming all the way up to around 1960. Then this data stopped supporting any sort of warming. The inconvenient tree ring data was then erased and replaced with surface temperature data that directly contradicted the tree rings. That data is potentially unreliable depending on where these sensors are placed. Some were placed in high population density areas where temperatures are higher than in the surrounding areas. Regardless of whether that data is accurate or not, even a non-scientific person can see the fraud here. You can't report a trend using one set of data and then prove the trend is continuing by swapping in data from another source.
That's just a small sample of the information that was uncovered by the hackers.
It'll be interesting to see how this scandal plays out. It's lovely timing that it's occurring just as the Copenhagen talks are getting underway. First the US can't pass a cap and trade law. Then the Australians reject a similar program. Now the core scientists advocating man-made global warming have been caught perpetrating fraud.
-- Roger
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." -- Benjamin Franklin
