They just talked about this on NPR and other climate researchers interviewed say this is a sad case of selective quotation and distortion of facts on the part of the critics. In addition, it appears the leak happened months ago but nothing was made public until now, coincidentally just before the Copenhagen meeting.
To me it looks a lot more like the CDO thing with banking. They compare their data with other people's results and throw out what doesn't look correct without giving a good reason (e.g. tree ring reconstruction after 1960).
The argument from this selected data is that "we all couldn't be wrong"...
Meanwhile the horror videos show of glaciers breaking up (a seasonal process) blaming that on climate change. Yet, no mention is made of the increasing ice in Antarctica since 1980. The few that acknowledges this fact blames it on global warming...
Arctic sea ice decrease.
Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speeding up.
Permafrost melting.
Bristlecone pines at altitude growing faster over the past 50 years.
Growing seasons expanding.
Birds migrating earlier or overwintering where they previously migrated.
The issue at hand here is one of trust and integrity. If the scientific community has none, then it is degrading itself to other areas of thought that use fabricated realities to push agendas.
This is exactly the sort of sweeping statement that the original comment was referring to. This is character assassination on a grand scale: Taking one aspect of one person's work and using that to cast FUD on all of science.
The "scientific community" doesn't rise or fall on the skill, actions, or integrity of one or two members, just as I have to accept that the "Ph.D.-holding physicist community" contains many people who are total loons, or even downright evil. We don't issue revokable membership cards.
The fact that cold fusion turned out to be a red herring doesn't cast suspicion on all the rest of nuclear physics. There is more than one piece of data in nuclear physics.
It should be possible to move on from conspiracy theories and questioning of people's intentions to some kind of fact finding mission.