Marathon Pundit: Climategate scientists: A sweaty polar bear ate my homework

Isn't it a basic rule of ongoing scientific research not to throw out data?

But the scientists at the University of East Anglia have their own guidelines.

And have these chaps ever heard of peer review?

Or there is this possibility: A sweaty polar bear the Climategate scientists' homework.

From the Times of London:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.