My views on global warming gate

It looks like, out of hundreds or thousands of hacked emails between climate scientists, dating from the mid-90s (I believe), GW deniers have cherry picked five gotchas and (probably deliberately) misinterpreted words (such as "trick") to be nefarious. Since I'm certain no amount of context and explanation could ever convince global warming denialists that these comments were benign, let's accept the denialists' claim that the scientists quoted were suggesting covering up legitimate data in order to perpetrate a global warming hoax on the public.

It remains that reality and the science will not change at all. Global temperatures will not decrease, arctic sea ice will not begin recomposing (please remember, these emails are supposed to specifically show a cover up of warming, not man's role in warming), permafrost now lost will not reappear, warming-related pine beetle infestations will not disappear, and so on.

What is almost certain to happen is a political change, quite possibly a dangerous one, given the seriousness of the issue. By this feeble "evidence", many people will be persuaded that all of the science is a hoax and the denialists will have won a huge PR victory. PR is their field, not climate science, and their business is confusion, so tomorrow they'll have a lot to give thanks for. You cannot create a publishable paper around any of their denialist ravings, and this latest "data" is nothing any peer-review board of any serious science journal would accept. Politics wins. We lose.