No but climategate is exactly the type of pseudo-controversy that I was getting at. Read the reports:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...No scientific misconduct. No fraud. But yes, concern over the public relations battle that scientists have been forced into. Would you rather scientists just concede that battle?
And again, they have been fighting that battle _without scientific misconduct_. There was no hiding of uncertainties, it's all there in the papers. There are very few fields of science where uncertainties are so well studied. The sentence in the NYT article you quote is simply not backed by the facts, and it is mistaking consensus for group-think.
Opposing requests for transparency (looking at raw code and data) is unfortunately all to common in science. The culture is shifting, but it's a result of things being generally messy. Often it takes considerable experience to reliably reach judgements on what the data/code outputs mean. And that's typically not well documented. I advocate for open science at my institute wherever I can. We're getting there.
One perfect example is the "hide the decline". Anyone with statistics training knows that "the decline" is perfectly consistent with the previous trend + fluctuations + data problems. It didn't challenge anything. It's also right there in the published papers. But of course if you want to put out press releases you can't assume your audience knows that, you need to communicate that fact. The part of the audience that understands that can read the papers just fine to figure out the details (they are not hard to read).