Consider this:

“Some scientists like to play with the notion that global disaster may result if environmental pollution continues unchecked. According to one scenario, the planet is already well advanced toward a phenomenon call ‘the greenhouse effect’.Concentrations of carbon dioxide are building up in the atmosphere, it is said, as the world’s vegetation which feeds on C02 is progressively chopped down. Hanging in the atmosphere, it forms a barrier trapping the planet’s heat. As a result, the greenhouse theorists contend, the world is threatened with a rise in average temperature which, if it reache 4 or 5 degress, could melt the polar ice caps and raise sea level by as much as 300 feet and cause a worldwide flood…. ”

This is what bears the name of “science” today. It is on the basis of this kind of stuff that your are being pushed into a new Dark Age.
–
from “The New Left:The Anti – Industrial Revolution”, a collection of essays by Ayn Rand, published first in 1971.

1971.

So yeah, this scam has been going on for a long time. It is unfortunate that the science is not better reviewed. The loss of data seems to be like the Library of Congress throwing out the Presidential Papers from the 19th Century because they “ran out of room, and they probably aren’t relevant anymore”.

I’ve been a so-called scientist for almost 30 years, albeit not in the same league as the gentlemen at the CRU. In the drug industry, you have to keep all kinds of records for YEARS, in case the FDA wants to review what you have done. I have notes and records from my undergraduate days in the ’70′s, still stashed in boxes in the basement. I have no doubt that my last employer (who was bought out by another company) has destroyed or discarded a lot of the records created back in the ’90′s, but I was hardly doing world class research, either.

If the science and data were THAT convincing, I would have been demanding a thorough peer review, were I running the CRU or other AGW research institutes. It would be compelling and persuasive to the doubters.

It IS part of the Anti-Industrial Revolution. Is is meant to substitute reason and thought for a quasi-religious belief in the purity of the world and sins of industrial man. It has been part of the long march of the Gramscians through the Academy. So-called business men have been and will continue to tout “being green” (the large company I am a part of does this routinely), and “environmental consciousness” to avoid getting bad publicity from Earth First! or the Sierra Club.
This leak or hack or whatever it was will be paved over and forgotten in the next few news ‘cycles’, unless those in the alternative media keep the story alive and keep asking questions.

Sooner or later, the truth will out. I hope. And things will get ugly before they get better. There is too much ego involved among the AGW believers.

And the biggest casualty will be the lost belief and trust in science as a whole.