Just finished reading Climategate: The CRUtape Letters, by T. Fuller & S. Mosher. If you're at all interested in the Climategate fiasco, the book is a fascinating behind the scenes look, via the leaked email correspondence and supplemented by related public blog postings. Definitely a buy if the nitty-gritty of corrupting science sounds appealing. It was a good read and learned much that I was unaware of previously, especially the context. For example, the information in the book helped clarify the machinations the IPCC went in violating their own policies regarding the "Jesus" paper that Bishop Hill had previously written about.
On a different topic, within the book one paragraph really struck me as indicative of the wholesale incompetence of the top scientists and administrators of the "premier" climate research center, the UK's CRU:
"The science behind calculating a global average is trivial. It is more properly an accounting task. But Jones and CRU appear to have made a total hash of the record keeping. If their responses to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests are to be believed, they don't have a list of the sites they currently use. They don't have a version control system that allows them to reconstruct what they have done over the years. And they can' tell the ultimate source of their data. Their work cannot be double-checked."
Having a business background in technology, and specifically a database start up, the CRU's total lack of professional data management, redundancy and security is truly appalling. Basing any trillion dollar economic, environmental and energy policies on such gross incompetence and negligence is mind-boggling. A major house cleaning is in order, with new management put into place, and a 3rd party, comprehensive forensic audit of the temperature data being accomplished, at a minimum. Policymakers need to ascertain whether the existing temperature data is actually reliable and accurate.
There is much more to the book than just the flat-out incompetence, but it does suggest an immediate need for the climate researchers to be removed from also being keepers of the climate data - they can't be trusted, for any number of reasons, including incompetent management. Read the book.