Some people are now turning over the rocks in the fortran code and finding all sorts of wormy stuff in the comments.

Apparently one of the reasons the CRU scientists haven’t wanted to release their data and code is the poor quality and all the hackery that went into splicing the data together.

No. If we are going to have these big life-and-death discussions of global warming, the datasets and the code that handles them should be in a universal repository that all have access to.

In principle it’s the right thing to do; given the stakes, or so we are told, of global cataclysm it’s absolutely a necessity.

Instead the AGW scientists have treated their work like it was a guild secret for solving quartic equations or manufacturing Coca-Cola, something jealously guarded to further their power and remuneration.

So whoever leaked this stuff has done us all a huge service, because from here out we’ll have the means to make a rational determination of the validity of the AGW assertions.

Meanwhile, editors of Nature and Science should be taken out and shot for incompetence for not insisting on public availability to all of the data. Traditionally those data would have been provided as supplementary material; that those editors did not insist on provision of those data as a pre-condition for publication is more than grounds for their termination.

In the meantime it seems that Al Gore has jumped the shark — here he is being dissed on Saturday Night Live.

The biggest question I have at this point is why any reasonably alert, sentient being is even vaguely surprised. These guys have been very open for a long time about their opinion that belief in this tripe is a species of virtue, that inciting general fear and dread of it amongst the population is a necessary tool, and that those who question is should be destroyed–up to and including credential revocation and general professional discrediting.

The only thing remotely surprising to me is that it has taken so long.

These “vehicles” have to be fought on two levels—the “science” and the politics. I suspect the hack this weekend was an inside job, else how to know which among so many files to hack? Whatever the case is, we owe the hacker an enormous debt of gratitude.

Many of us not being scientists, it is our job to see to the political side, and see how many truly conservative members of Congress and members of state and local governments we can elect, and how many Democrats and RINOS we can defeat. The vote on the Senate’s health care bill should settle any doubts about the ultimate allegiance of all Democrats to the Democrat’s far Left agenda, however much some Democrats—the Blue Dogs, for instance–talk of their moderation and “doubts.”