Puckhog, you have missed the point. McIntyre has access to all the primary data. Public or no, that's all that scientific ethics dictate he have. Information is not being withheld. If McIntyre is worth getting excited over, the primary data should be enough for him to do whatever analysis he wants. He shouldn't need the secondary data. He should be able to replicate the analysis.
Re: The budget and funding. Do you have ANY idea how much it costs to run a serious scientific lab? AT ALL? For a world class lab, that is not an unreasonable sum. It is not one person. That 1 mill likely funds a whole team. The grant holder is merely the team leader. With that, salaries for grad students, postdocs, techs, etc., have to be paid, travel for work has to be funded, expensive equipment, computers, etc., have to be purchased. Plus, a place like the CRU likely skims a sizeable portion of the top to run the facility.
Can you even tell me what the original e-mail that set this off means? I don't know what it means. It could be interpreted any number of ways. No one here can actually definitively explain to me what all of this actually means.
Besides which, even if the researchers in question are engaged in some degree of scientific impropriety, they represent only a small handful of research groups, in a smaller focus area, paleoclimate research, within the greater field of climate research. The competitive nature of cutting edge research dictates that someone will correct whatever errors they have made eventually. This is hardly a killing blow to the concept of anthropogenic climate change, nor is it indicative of a massive left-wing conspiracy. At worst, if the messages are interpreted in their most negative light, it's probably part of an attempt to to squeeze out a couple more Nature papers. Still deplorable. Still shouldn't be done. But it isn't the first time it's happened in any scientific field.
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