While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents.
"Apparent slowness"? Bullshit. The emails show a very active ongoing effort to suppress release of information and to "hide the decline", irreproducible results, appalling sloppiness in model construction. And now this apologia for anti-scientific behavior from a True Believer.
You quoted the exact same line that grabbed me as well. Sorry on this one, scientist are held to a different standard than the rest of the population. Any other scientist in any other field, would be summarily discredited for a fraction of the ethical violations that these individuals engaged in. All of their work should now be subjected to scrutiny and should be re-validated by a independent party.
IMHO their work should be re-validated, if it fails to meet the standard, and if even a minor portion of their work appears to show purposeful tampering or deceit, then all of their work should be black-listed as well as these scientists themselves.
Politics and game-playing is only an ethical violation. Tampering with ANY data is a violation of the very nature of being a scientist, and any 'scientist' willing to violate the core principles of the art cannot and should not be recognized as a scientist in any way, shape or form and neither should anything they produced be recognized in anyway as being scientific without complete validation from an impartial independent party.
"Apparent slowness"? Bullshit. The emails show a very active ongoing effort to suppress release of information and to "hide the decline", irreproducible results, appalling sloppiness in model construction. And now this apologia for anti-scientific behavior from a True Believer.