The news of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

(via Ars Technica)

Late last week, a collection of e-mails and documents began appearing on a variety of websites, purportedly a selection of a much larger cache of material obtained when hackers gained entry to the UK’s Climatic Research Unit. All indications are that the documents are legitimate, and they reveal the scientists behind them as fully human: snarky, dismissive, prone to using colloquialisms instead of technical terms, and protective of their data—perhaps unethically protective. A lot of the material sounds very familiar to people working in scientific fields, but the response suggests that the e-mails may expand the gap between scientists and the public in this contentious field.

The scientific community became aware of the hacking when the perpetrators, fresh from their success, attempted to deface the popular Real Climate blog, turning it into a host for the archive. Shortly afterwards, the documents appeared at a site frequented by climate skeptics, and have since been mirrored elsewhere. This isn’t the full trove of stolen files, as the hackers have only uploaded a selected portion of the material (presumably, items they felt made the scientists look especially bad), and it’s possible that there was some manipulation of the contents. But the majority of the material appears to be legitimate; a New York Times reporter has tracked down some of the people who wrote the e-mails and confirmed their accuracy (the reporter’s own correspondence with a number of the scientists made an appearance).

But the questions don’t end simply with whether the e-mails are legit, as the larger meaning of their contents isn’t necessarily obvious. So far, they’ve acted a bit like a Rorschach test, revealing more about the person reading them than they do about the text’s author, with reactions ranging from a collective yawn to hyperbolic claims that they reveal all of climate science as a complete fraud. In the end, there seem to be three issues that the e-mails illuminate that are worth discussing separately (there may be others buried in the archive, but there are three that seem obvious from initial reports)….