Climatic Research Unit Leak

Bingo! We have a winner.

There is a high likelihood that Charlie Martin has guessed the principal reason for refusing to release the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit's data and methods:

I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work.

It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

Of course, some of the data CRU started with has probably been tossed away and replaced by data they've massaged over the years to get the result they expect from their efforts to estimate the global average temperature. But that is just another facet of the same problem--even they cannot replicate their work.

And the CRU temperature estimates are a major part of the whole "global warming" hypothesis. Most of the work done by others assumes the CRU temperatures are valid and reliable.

What if they aren't?

How can anyone know?