It should not matter whether research is done in academia or industry. What matters is the conflicts of interest and funding sources.

It makes no odds if a study comes from work done at Oxford Uni or Exxon if it's funded by fossil fuel interests. I, along with most others, am going to be naturally suspicious of claims without independent verification. Likewise a study of the health impacts of red meat funded by some US cattle interests (as randomly cropped up on HN a while back) carries far less weight than the same study from an independently funded source.

I don't know anyone who has an over-credulous belief in the moral purity of academics. That's absurd. There's probably more likelihood of moral purity than in an industry lab, thanks to fewer overt conflicts or agendas to push, but there's no reason to blindly believe without peer review, replication and analysis, as appropriate.

On climategate:

Yes, they were cleared of wrongdoing, Russel's investigations criticised the openness, but concluded:

The "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit were found not to be in doubt. However, the panel also concluded the scientists were insufficiently open about their work

That sounds like cleared to me. I did not claim they were found to be perfect. No human (or scientist) has yet achieved that.

It's too long ago to remember exactly what was covered by the various FoI requests, but it seems entirely inappropriate to release data under FoI for work in progress before publication with analysis and conclusions. After that, requests for both raw and processed data should be honoured. So openness will always come with limits. That would apply to work in any field, whether in academia or industry.

Science isn't, and can't be perfect. Mistakes will be made, techniques will be sloppy, occasionally there will be outright fraud etc. There are processes to catch, correct and withdraw.

Meanwhile the CATO Institute's Michaels and WUWT were pouring lies and oil onto the fire, trying to stoke maximum damage. They managed to come out of the episode with pretty much no credibility at all. Of course there were no independent studies into their behaviour, or honesty, or any consequence for their lies. In fact they appear to be held to no standards at all. How convenient.

WUWT is not a peer review journal. They are not a messenger, they are a blog with an agenda. If Watts or any of his colleagues want to put out papers into the corpus in a reputable source, their results can stand or fall on their accuracy. The few times papers proposing alternatives to AGW have come out they have not, so far, stood scrutiny. I rather hope they do, as it would be nice to discover it was all a big misunderstanding and everything will be fine really.

At this point it's difficult to conclude WUWT are acting in good faith on any level. It appears to be an intentional attempt to distract, confuse and muddy whilst taking time and energy from anyone who is trying to actually advance (or disprove) the science. It's the tobacco and asbestos playbook. When they make a credible case it'll be in Nature or some such. I won't hold my breath.

As a last point:

> Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit.

OK, so now what? Science apparently has no checks or balances acceptable to you, or is it all a global conspiracy? It doesn't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell. How very strange their results have gone against the interests of their sponsors. It makes it damn awkward to build a convincing chain of corruption and conspiracy though.

That's unanswerable.