The HARRY_READ_ME.txt file:

So, come with me on a wonderful journey as the CRU team realise that not only have they lost great chunks of data but also that their application suites and algorithms are total crap; join your humble Devil and Asimov as we dive into the HARRY_READ_ME.txt (thanks to The Englishman) file and follow the trials and tribulations of Ian “Harry” Harris as he tries to recreate the published data because he has nothing else to go on!
Thrill as he “glosses over” anomalies; let your heart sing as he gets some results to within 0.5 degrees; rejoice as Harry points out that everything is undocumented and that, generally speaking, he hasn’t got the first clue as to what’s going on with the data!
Chuckle as one of CRU’s own admits that much of the centre’s data and applications are undocumented, bug-ridden, riddled with holes, missing, uncatalogued and, in short, utterly worthless.
And wonder as you realise that this was v2.10 and that, after this utter fiasco, CRU used the synthetic data and wonky algorithms to produce v3.0!
You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You won’t wonder why CRU never wanted to release the data! You will wonder why we are even contemplating restructuring the world economy and wasting trillions of dollars on the say-so of data this bad.

But don’t take their word. Here’s HARRY himself;

ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently – I have no memory of this at all – we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
OH FUCK THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.

Upon this rests the wealth of nations.

“Then came Friday’s bombshell.”
Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal;

This had been a disappointing fall for climate alarmists, even before Friday’s revelation that for years some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists may have been doctoring the evidence for global warming in order to sustain their thesis that man-made carbon emissions are making the world dangerously warm…

Front page news in Germany (link to translated page).

Google News is pulling up more links by the hour, as formal news items researched over the weekend – albeit many of them shamelessly apologist and misleading – go to press.
Commentors here and elsewhere are expressing disgust/concern/anger that the scandal isn’t the top story of every major newspaper- and rightfully so. But their industry is dying for a reason – dinosaurs don’t change their rot.
Meanwhile, the real investigation goes on. The latest revelations are to be found in the MANN code files…

; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;

But this event is less bombshell than it is bottle genie. No matter what efforts are undertaken by a protective media to bury this scandal, no matter how badly the warmist industry tries to spin it away, the CRU data release is now part of the permanent climate debate, and it ain’t ever going away.

From the Bishop Hill summary – “Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!”

Plus: “….how a crude fax from Jack Eddy became the definitive IPCC record on the last millennium!”
Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean? is a must-read.

If we do accept them as authentic, though, they truly are incendiary. They appear to reveal not one, not two, but three real scandals, of increasing importance.

Finally – take the “so you think you can do climate science” quiz!

The mainstream is getting into the meat of the CRU hack – Wall Street Journal;

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn’t always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a “unified” view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to “beef up” conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a “big public splash.”
The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific “consensus” was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who presented findings that differed from orthodox views.
Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists have dismissed those claims.
The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.
Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as “prats” and “utter prats.” In other exchanges, one climate researcher said he was “very tempted” to “beat the crap out of” a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.
In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.
One email from 1999, titled “CENSORED!!!!!” showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. “As for thinking that it is ‘Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us’ … as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not,” the email said.
More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled “FOIA,” a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.
Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.

Boston Herald;

In an embarrassing blow to the movement to combat global warming, hackers have posted hundreds of e-mails from a world-renowned British institute that show researchers colluding to exaggerate warming and undermine skeptics.

The story is moving from the blogs to mainstream. Don’t be too critical of the delay – I do know that there are Canadian journalists working on this, but it takes time. Anyone who has been sifting through the database will understand why.