"I have also felt really tired"

The dam has burst on the politicized climate science operation, the Hockey Stick Team, run by Phil Jones at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and Michael Mann of Penn State University.

The release of a decade of emails between the principals of the Hockey Stick Team shows that the team was not really doing science. It was doing politics. Roger Tracinski's piece on the release of the CRUTape letters is as good a review of the situation as any.

What does it mean? It means that Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistical expert and proprietor of Climate Audit (and now CAMirror), is vindicated. It was years ago in the early 2000s that McIntyre started looking at the Mann Hockey Stick paper, MBH98, and discovered what was to him a startling lack of due diligence.

Since then Steve has plugged away, "auditing" the work product of the Hockey Stick Team, exposing all the shoddy work and trying, with increasing success, to get access to their raw data and their methodology.

On November 22, 2009, in a comment, Steve McIntyre responded to a commenter asking him about the data in the CRUTape Letters.

Sure, I’ve nibbled at it, but I’ve spent more time on the mail so far. It’s hard to know where to start. I also have felt really tired.

Yes. I imagine after a decade of work, and after years of battling against calumny and obstruction, there is a "Nunc Dimittis" feeling about this moment. For you folks without a religious education, it means: "Now let thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word." In the large sense, McIntyre's work is done. He has got the world to pay attention to his voice crying in the wilderness. Now the consequences will play out according to their own momentum.

Because now the Hockey Stick Team has been exposed. The Team members have fiddled with the data; they have politicized the scientific publication process; they have had troublesome people fired.

And all the world knows it.

The Hockey Stick Team has had millions of dollars to play with. Other climate researchers have had billions to spend.

But one thing we can say today for sure. We do not have a scientific basis for spending trillions of dollars battling climate change. We just do not have the knowledge to justify it.

Especially now that we know that we can't trust the scientists doing the research.