I take it as more self delusion than fraud or hoax. The greatest medical advance of the Twentieth Century was the double blind clinical trial.
The problem at CRU is more one of uncontroled acceptance bias, the normal human tendency to accept information that we are comfortable with and reject information that makes us uncomfortable. With all due respect, FR is a clinical example of acceptance bias.
Acceptance bias is not acceptable in science, because the entire point of the scientific method is to overcome the limitations of human psychology, to allow us to see the truth despite our prejudices, fears and hopes.
You might reasonably refer to something like the Romney examples of late, which are, IMHO, a pre-emptive response to the type of abuses which have saddled the Republican presidential ticket with the likes of McLame. The cauldron of discussion that sorted all that out was very well represented by the spectrum of Republican (and other) input.
On the resonably instructive side of your comments, there is a certainly among FR members a raft of "less-thoughtful", predictable responders, who in typical parlance might be called "the choir." They do tend readily to "pile on".
Your insightful comments about the double blind clinical trial method and overcoming the limitations (and predispositions) of human psychology, are tremendously on-point, however. Thank you.
The crew@CRU had overwhelming career-advancing and financial incentives dangling before them. To suggest "self-delusion" would explain their behavior would typify excuse-finding, blame-minimizing psychologizing that has so muddied our legal system. The fraud clearly perpetrated by these hucksters, while fanned by the high and mighty from the Leftist political classes, has diverted hundreds of billions of dollars from useful purposes to entirely counter-productive ones while falsely destroying the professional careers of many of our highest-minded true scientists and presenting skewed examples to those still coming up through the ranks. That's more than mere self-convinced delusion at work there.
Many politicians, e.g. Babs Boxer, appear insufficiently prescient or savvy to let the crew@CRU be the fall-guys and extract themselves from culpabilty. Perhaps they are simply more guided by the Boutos Boutros-Ghali and Coffee Ananas examples of how UN scandals like Food-for-Oil have played out.
Leftist Media, Leftist politicians, Leftist academics (now there's a redundancy) and Leftist movers and shakers in the scientific world all seem to be punishably complicit in this greatest fraud of all time! I won't be excusing anyone just because the claim they were deluded.
HF