Climate change: Global warming with the lid off

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article that has spurred a huge number of comments and further muddied the climate change debate.

Global Warming With the Lid Off provides a peek into the hidden/secret/deleted emails between scientists.

The WSJ report notes that the emails show that at least some scientists worked to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate, advised each other on how to "smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis," to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals and gave tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

Here's the intro to the article, but click on the link above for more:

'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.