Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on brief soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.

The author basically says it’s lies, but I throw in ignorance to give those who just don’t know better, and believe everything they’re told, the benefit of the doubt. In this article, the author does an outstanding job of examining the context for the emails in question — something that is sorely lacking from any “skeptical” ramblings on the subject. First, he covers the most repeated quote, which involves a supposed attempt to “hide the decline”:

The full email from Jones says: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith [Briffa]’s, to hide the decline.” The decline being referred to was an apparent decline in temperatures shown in analysis of tree rings. Tree rings have historically correlated well with changes in temperature, but that relationship has broken down in the past half century. The reasons are still debated among scientists. The “trick” was a graphic device used by Mann in a 1998 paper in Nature to merge tree ring data from earlier times with thermometer data for recent decades. He explained it in the paper. Jones was repeating it in another paper.

This statement in that email was basically dealing the issue of divergence in the last several decades between tree ring proxy data and modern temperature data. But I guess it sounds so much more like a massive conspiracy when it is construed to mean that scientists were adjusting the temperature record to make it seem as though the planet was warming when it really wasn’t.

*sigh*