"Climategate"

Ok, I'll bite. I've already posted two blog entries today, and it's already late, but I've just spent the last 2 1/2 hours researching this whole "Climategate" email thing (and climate change in general) and I feel like I should address it. But since it's late and my brain is exhausted from reading various articles, blogs, and discussions (some of them informative, some of them asinine) this entry will mostly be a collection of relevant links.

For a general overview of the situation, see the Wikipedia article.

For some biased news articles proclaiming "conspiracy!", check out the Washington Times and Telegraph.

Realclimate seems to be an often-referenced source in various discussions. The specific post about the CRU email hack and a summary post are specifically relevant.

This is the blog where I first learned of the email hack, and yes I did read all of the comments. I wouldn't recommend doing the same, but there were a few interesting nuggets in there. Here is another blog that I skimmed over. At this point it was getting quite late, and I didn't read any of the comments.

I'll be interested in seeing how this develops. For now I need to gather my thoughts, though I'll read up on this more after taking a break from it. Overall, it seems like a desperate (note that the emails were illegally obtained) ploy to reduce the likelihood that effective decisions will be made in Copenhagen, most likely because the hackers/those involved have a financial stake in "business as usual" (i.e. not acting to mitigate climate change). It sounds like some of the CRU scientists may have been involved in illegal activity, but even if they're convicted it doesn't invalidate the hundreds, if not thousands, of peer-reviewed journal articles that support Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'm hoping that this will be understood come Copenhagen.