At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey explores “Weird Science”, as he spots East Anglia CRU throwing out their raw data:

When would scientists expecting the world to take them seriously throw out the raw data on which their conclusions are based?  Probably at the same time that they e-mail each other to launch professional vendettas against skeptics and conspire to hide contradictory data.  The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit — already in a deep scandal over the e-mails released by either a hacker or a whistleblower that shows highly unscientific behavior behind the scenes — now admits they threw out the raw data on which much of their theories on anthropogenic global warming are based (via Fausta):

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

So now the only data that other scientists can check are those that have been, er, adjusted by UEA-CRU.  Were those “adjustments” proper?  Did they have a scientific basis for making those adjustments?  Were there any gaps in the data?

We’ll never know now, will we?  And after the release of the e-mails that show UEA-CRU deliberately kneecapping other scientists who dared venture from the heterodoxy and discuss methods of hiding contradictory data and findings, it’s hard to believe that this wasn’t by design rather than carelessness.  After all, without that raw data, the world would have to just take UEA-CRU’s word for it — and until those e-mails got released, it seems that most people would have done so.

Now, though, even some AGW scientists say that the scientists involved in the UEA-CRU scandal have to go.  One of the contributors to the UN IPCC effort, Dr. Eduardo Zorita, says that several of the people involved in the IPCC should be banned, the result of their credibility deficit.

Click over to Ed’s post for the comments from Zorita; Ed concludes:

The bullying atmosphere in Academia on AGW has ruined the credibility of the effort — and not just at the University of East Anglia.  Any PhD student in the field would have known on which side the bread would be buttered, and would be unlikely to commit career suicide by producing contradictory data.  The actions of the IPCC authors created an atmosphere of groupthink, paranoia, and toadyism, not science or truth.  Any results coming from this arena have to be entirely suspect.

The AGW movement has been exposed as a religious belief and a political cash cow, not science.

And that it’s been that way for a while. As Al Gore himself was quoted as saying in 2008:

“This is not a political issue,” Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. “It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue.”

The sort of post-Christian beliefs that Gore espouses were confirmed recently by the British government. (Hey, not everyone can be a Jedi Knight in England.)  And those who are true believers will always have faith in the prophecies of the Goracle, as Jim Treacher highlights via “A friendly chat with the global warming evangelist who lives in my head”:

Hello, hyperventilating zealot.

Greetings, denialist scum.

Now that we’ve dispensed with the formalities, please allow me to point and laugh at you. Ahem. Ha ha ha! Point point point!

Shut up.

That’s what you’d like me to do. That’s what you’d like all of us to do. Shut our mouths and open our wallets. Did you really think it was going to be so easy?

This doesn’t prove anything.

What doesn’t?

You know.

We both do. I just want to hear you say it.

This Clim… This Climateguh. Guh.

That’s it, almost there.

This Climategate garbage doesn’t mean anything! You science-denying neocon fascist racist warmongering planet-raping… [Goes on like this for a bit]

My goodness. Feel better?

No.

Well, I do. OMG, can you believe Obama changed his mind about going to Copenhagen after all this stuff came out? It’s like sprinting to board your ship at the last minute, and it’s the Titanic.

Short of President Obama embracing reality — and that’s not going to happen on a whole stack of issues — in his Washington Examiner column, Glenn Reynolds suggests the best possible outcome for Copenhagen:

It seems clear that the Obama administration, and the folks in traditional media, think this is a story better ignored.

It won’t work. While Big Media folks ignore the story, the alternate media are all over it.

From blogs, to talk radio, to Facebook and Twitter — and, of course, the Obama administration’s bete noire, Fox News — this story is sweeping the nation and the world (it has already provoked resignations in Australia). With the data made available online, individuals and groups continue to search through the records and find new nuggets of information.

Polls have shown growing public skepticism, both in the U.S. and abroad, even before the Climategate revelations. That is now likely to grow.

For politicians, hitching their wagon to the carbon-control star was already an iffy proposition given widespread economic problems and public skepticism. In light of the Climategate revelations, many of them are likely to view it as something closer to suicide.

My prediction: The Copenhagen global warming conference will feature a lot of pretty words and promises, and no admission that things have changed. But we’ll see little or no actual movement, as politicians around the world realize that there’s no percentage in pushing these programs on an increasingly wary public.

(Vintage Weird Science-era Kelly LeBrock photo added to make this post comply with current Blogospheric Rule #5 Sunday regulations.)

Update: Found via the Bellmont Club, the late Michael Crichton on environmentalism as a religion:

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Of course, that wasn’t the only issue about which Crichton displayed remarkable prescience.