A Scientific Warming Scandal?

It's being called Climategate and it's possibly a scandal of global proportions.

Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. The institution is the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, home institution for Dr Phil Jones and one of the world’s centers of research into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or “climate change.”

The hackers released about 172 megabytes of data, and we can be sure examining it closely will take some time. But after a few days, certain things are beginning to become clear.

The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic.
The emails are incendiary.
The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW, and the scientific reputations of some of AGW’s major proponents, to their roots.