Phil Jones, at the center of the climate change scandal resigned on Tuesday--the first casualty of hacked emails that opened a can of worms in the global warming debate. Jones announced he would step down from his post at the Climate Research Unit located at East Anglia University in Britain.

"What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible," Jones said in a statement. "After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director's role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support."

Climate skeptics have seized on several e-mails from Phil Jones...to other researchers as evidence that prominent scientists have sought to silence their voice in the debate over global warming. The e-mails were pirated and posted online last month.

They threw their raw data out?! The Hot Air blog had a few words to say about that:

When would scientists expecting the world to take them seriously throw out the raw data on which their conclusions are based?  Probably at the same time that they e-mail each other to launch professional vendettas against skeptics and conspire to hide contradictory data. 

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.

Hmmmmm.... Why is the mainstream media not picking this story up??