Climategate: What Really Happened?

"Climate science has basically been at the receiving end of the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known—that's the bottom line," Mann told me when I visited him at his Penn State office last November. Near his desk, Mann keeps an actual hockey stick, signed by Middlebury College's championship hockey team to show the school's support for his work.

Things really heated up for Mann in late 2009, when more than 1,000 emails from him and other climate scientists were lifted from a server at the Climatic Research Unit [22] (CRU) of the UK's University of East Anglia, the world's leading research institution focused on climate change. The emails offered a window into the climate-science bunker, with a view of Mann and his fellow researchers growing increasingly defensive. One scientist wrote [23] that he was "tempted to beat the crap out of" a skeptic at the libertarian Cato Institute. Another joked that the way to deal with skeptics was "continuing to publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia hit)." Scientists suggested that they would rather destroy data than provide them to their critics. They also discussed using "tricks" in their research, debated how to frame uncertainties in some of their data, and attempted to control access to peer-reviewed journals.
...
[Kevin Trenberth] also warns that the report could raise more questions than it answers: "[W]hile our knowledge of certain factors does increase, so does our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize." At the leading edge of climate science, he writes, displaying the limits and uncertainties of science so publicly is not without risk, so the IPCC should proceed with caution when sounding the alarm bells.