Andrew Revkin has a good summary of the fallout in the scientific community from the stolen CRU emails: Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research.

Some prominent climate scientists are calling for changes in the way research on global warming is conducted after a British university said thousands of private e-mail messages and documents had been stolen from its climate center.

The scientists say that the e-mail messages, which have circulated on the Internet and which disclose the inner workings of a small network of climatologists who chart the planet’s temperature, have damaged the public’s trust in the evidence that humans are dangerously warming the planet, just as many countries are poised to start reining in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

She and other scientists are seeking more transparency in the way climate data is handled and in the methods used to analyze it. And they argue that scientists should re-evaluate the selection procedures used by some scientific journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the panel that in 2007 concluded that humans were the dominant force driving warming and whose findings underpin international discussions over a new climate treaty.

I’ve commented several times in our discussions about this issue that I understand why the scientists at CRU were resistant to sharing data with people like Steven McIntyre, whose only reason for demanding access to the data is to cherry-pick through it for new out-of-context denialist talking points. And it’s understandable how the constant stream of distortions and lies from their critics could lead to a sort of “bunker mentality,” in which the CRU scientists began to believe it was better for them to withhold the data, to make it harder for the deniers to attack.

It’s understandable, but for political — not scientific — reasons it would be better to just go ahead, share everything openly and transparently, and deal with the inevitable deniers’ distortions — rather than create the impression that they’re trying to hide something.

It may be difficult and frustrating to have to take time away from actual research and productive work to deal with dishonest attacks, but in the current highly charged political atmosphere, it’s necessary — or the scientific community is handing the deniers a public relations weapon that they will have no hesitation using. It’s time for climatologists to up their game, and take on the deniers openly. The scientific community has facts and reality on its side, and that has to count for something.

RealClimate has a good start on this, with a new page dedicated to listing dozens of sources for climate data: RealClimate: Data Sources.

UPDATE at 11/28/09 2:53:07 pm:

Please note: none of what I wrote above changes my opinion that “CRU-gate” is an absolutely phony scandal, deliberately trumped up and distorted to sabotage the Copenhagen climate summit meeting.