What the emails in total show is a systemic effort to exaggerate findings and promote those findings.
That doesn’t undermine / eliminate the case for AGW. It (hopefully) will get people back to looking at the actual physics and uncertainties and realize a few things -
1) that you can’t squeeze precision out of sparse data sets. Uncertainty is part of statistics and can’t be whittled away except with data and no one has a time machine to go back and get more data. Meanwhile, Mann’s paleoclimactic proxies (which have never had high statistical certainty with or without “tricks”) will suffer a blow and need to be scrutinized.
2) uncertainty can’t be covered over with a dogmatic PR campaign that substitutes moral certitude for scientific certitude while engaging in fraudulent activities to hide the uncertainty endemic to the science.
3) concluding from all of this that “AGW is not real” or “is not supported” is simply wrong. The physics haven’t changed. What has come to light are cases of misconduct that meant to “tweak” conclusions that are intrinsically uncertain so they’d seem more certain. All the same, if you pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in sufficient quantity you will get warming. How much gas gets how much warming? Uncertain, but it is a good idea to find out. Perhaps if personalities (and attendant personality cults) like those of Mann and Jones take a back seat we might just be able to calmly and patiently find out.
My hope out of this is that the catastrophists who shut down all conversations by declaring anyone discussing uncertainty as amoral imbeciles will be chastened and adopt some humility. Hopefully they will see this episode as humiliating because it is. But we are dealing with monumental egos operating in an echo chamber, so uncertainty about that outcome rears its head.
