Consider the Brits on the sideline until 2012 on global warming.  The Met Office will need three years to rebuild ground-based climate models while recompiling raw data from the past 160 years to replace the data that the University of East Anglia’s CRU destroyed years ago.  They want to create an open and transparent full data set, but until then have to back down from any of the conclusions that relied on UEA-CRU’s models (via QandO):

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

The British government is attempting to silence the Met Office, however:

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

But I thought they were interested in science, not political hackery!

The Met Office is taking the correct approach.  The data on which they largely relied has not only been shown to have been corrupted by bias and corruption, it’s also been destroyed.  Knowing the UEA-CRU’s credibility as a scientific effort has been compromised, real scientists would insist on recreating the data set in a thoroughly testable and transparent process before proceeding to use any of the conclusions reached from the previous work to form any more recommendations for action.

In fact, the UN, the UK, and the rest of the world should be insisting on the same approach — if they were interested in science in the first place.  The UK’s efforts to quash the Met Office’s review, which is what scientists would demand in any other context, shows that the politicians aren’t terribly interested in whether AGW is scientifically supportable, or even true at all.  They want the power that AGW hysteria gives them to seize control of private-industry production and the choices available to people now.

It’s the ultimate elitist entrée to statism, and they’re not going to let Climategate get in the way of it — even if the scientists themselves start balking at the political hackery surrounding AGW.