Scientists behaving badly

My friend Steven Hayward is the author of The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order and the concluding volume published this year The Age of Reagan, 1980-1989: The Conservative Counterrevolution.
Steve is also the author of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. The fourteenth edition of the Index was published in April by the Pacific Research Institute to coincide with Earth Day and Lenin’s birthday; it is accessible in PDF here.
The cover story of the new issue of the Weekly Standard is Steve’s “Scientists behaving badly.” Steve reviews the “CRUtape letters,” i.e., the large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain that were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. (Andrew Bolt speculates on the latter scenario.)
Steve’s article provides a useful summary of the documents and situates them in the global warming debate, sorting out the issues and the personalities along the way. Steve touches on the destruction of raw data by the CRU. His account of this episode can be supplemented by Patrick Michaels’s “The dog ate global warming.”
Our own John Hinderaker has written a lot about the East Anglia CRU emails, here, here, here, here, and here. John’s conclusion is that “the emails and other documents are damaging to the cause of the partisans of anthropogenic global warming, mostly because they stand exposed as exactly that–partisans, engaged in a political rather than scientific enterprise.” I think it’s fair to say that Hayward’s reading is consistent with John’s.