…of peer review:

What these and other episodes reveal was that there was a concerted effort to stage-manage the appearance of an ironclad consensus at the expense of the scientific process. Rather than make an open and honest argument that, despite persistent uncertainties, there is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to a gradual warming of the atmosphere, they focused on squelching dissenting scientific views, corrupting science in the process.

Unfortunately, as a commenter there notes, there isn’t anything really new about this. Kuhn understood it over half a century ago. This episode simply provided an ugly window into it, and in a case where the science is deeply consequential. It doesn’t “prove” that the earth is not anthropogenically warming (and people who think that science “proves” things in general simply demonstrate their lack of understanding of science). What it does show is that the people who have been telling us that it does are not to be trusted, and that a thorough, and transparent, review of the evidence is in order before we base major policy on their preferences.

[Update a few minutes later]

Another good point in comments, and you should really read all the comments over there. It is in response to the comment that we shouldn’t throw out all of the good science and scientists based on these bad apples:

100% of the scientists with like conclusions who have had their emails and code exposed to the world seem to have engaged in bad behaviour. Furthermore, very few of the scientists with like conclusions condemned the bad behaviour, instead beginning by defending it. Given these facts, I think we should say that we don’t know whether other scientist with like conclusions have engaged in bad behaviour, rather than just assuming that they haven’t.

Also:

…it is critical to examine the influence the bad apples have had over everything subsequent. To do that you first need to realize that although there are reams of studies on AGW indeed, they are almost all based off a shocking small group of data. Historic temperature wise, there are 3 major datasets in the world, and (apparently now that CRU has lost theirs) one repository for raw data. These datasets are references in a staggering amount of research, and their creators and care takers are the exact people in question here. Doug [sic] Jones being the godfather. The Wegman report warmed of how a small group of climate scientists from a small number of institutes were working too closely together to hope for any independent analysis. That has proved entirely true.

Slightly OT, but that first comment reminds me of the national, even global exchange we’ve had over the past eight years:

Defense: Not all Muslims are terrorists.

Retort: Yes, but to first order, at least lately, all terrorists have been Muslim.

Sadly for those scientists with integrity working in this field (and we don’t know how many there are — perhaps most of those with integrity have been chased out by now), this scandal has tainted them all, even if the media continues to misreport or ignore it.