I think, major irony alert, they're using the weakest claims against them ("the exact percentage of the Netherlands under sea level matters" -- seriously, who cares) to sweep the most damning claims against them under the rug.
This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.
That is a lovely two-step there: this keruffle about a footnote is largely meaningless so it is essentially meaningless that the head of one of the most prestigious research institutions in the world successfully destroyed evidence rather than handing it over to opposed investigators.
'sweep the most damning claims against them under the rug'
Which claims are those? One of the problems with this debate is that both sides keep on going "but that's not the main issue, it's something else" and then don't specify what the main issue is.
Exactly right: the behaviour of the CRU is anti-scientific to the core. To deny access to data and the analysis on which their claims are made is the antithesis of science, it is more like religious zealotry in the worst sense of the phrase. This is the reason why climategate is a lot more than a media storm.
This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.
That is a lovely two-step there: this keruffle about a footnote is largely meaningless so it is essentially meaningless that the head of one of the most prestigious research institutions in the world successfully destroyed evidence rather than handing it over to opposed investigators.