What East Anglia's E-mails Really Tell Us About Climate Change

From Popular Mechanics:

PM guest analyst Peter Kelemen, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explains what stolen e-mails from climate scientists corresponding with East Anglia University tell us about global warming—and what they don't.

In the past two weeks, scientists like myself have been gripped by news of the theft and online release of more than a decade of e-mails from one of the world's leading centers for climate-change research, the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia. During these same weeks, world political leaders have been preparing for a climate summit in Copenhagen and a new study has indicated that a major ice sheet in eastern Antarctica, previously thought to be stable, is in fact losing mass. But those developments have been overshadowed by the stolen e-mails and what they may imply about how research into human-induced global warming is carried out.

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