It's amazing what you can find if you have a bit of imagination, and access to somebody's personal e-mail account. Careful scrutiny of my mails, for example, could reveal many interesting things; that I cycle to work every day, that I am Belle de Jour, and that my Grandfather made up Antarctica for a bet. Much like, say, the Bible, or a tabloid headline ending in a question-mark, given a suitably ambiguous piece of text you can read from it pretty much whatever you like.

If you're less imaginative, what you'll find from the leaked East Anglian CRU e-mails is pretty much nothing. Which is unsurprising, since East Anglia is probably the most boring county region ever devised by man. In fact, one of the biggest clues that the e-mails are genuine is the distinct lack of any evidence of a conspiracy within them. As RealClimate have put it:

"More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."

It's worth fisking some of the best canards out there and these seem to revolve around "hide the decline", which is already explained over at RealClimate, and various other e-mails explained in an expanding list here.

The problem of course is context, with 'hide the decline' being a useful case in point. The full phrase was:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

If you're a conspiracy theorist looking for new material, it's easy to see how this could look like a real gem of a quote as long as you squint a bit to read between the lines, as follows:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s [deceptive] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline in temperatures that we want to conceal."

In other words, it's compelling evidence if you allow your initial biases to create new imaginary words for you to read. In reality of course, this is just a comment about the divergence problem, whereby tree ring data from a particular source they're discussing diverges from the temperature record after 1961. Of course, that's a far less fun and interesting interpretation (note: you can see more detail on it at Island of Doubt as well).

Ultimately though, when conspiracy theorists are reduced to presenting reinterpretations of ambiguous phrases, it's not surprising that the story has failed to gain much traction.

Some of the reaction to this has, to be fair, been a bit more sensible, with more reasonable skeptics pointing out that actually this leak really adds nothing to the debate. The mainstream media have largely ignored it, evidently realizing that there is about as much useful material there as you'd find on a Sports Illustrated bikini model. Nonetheless, a couple of the more rabid columnists have picked up on the story, none with more enthusiasm than Mad Mel, who vomits up this glorious statement:

"If true, a revealed systematic fraud of this magnitude will surely not only bury AGW once and for all but, as Philip Stott anxiously observes, this ultimately inevitable outcome may well bring all of science into disrepute as a result."

No doubt geologists are even now quaking in their boots as they await the verdict on the East Anglian Climate Research Unit. But this phrase speaks volumes; not about climate research but to the sort of hissy fit that people like Melanie Phillips experience whenever science disagrees with their preconceived notions about the world. For Mad Mel, science is an enemy; and by extension truth.

One area that might be concerning is the reluctance of scientists to engage with the FOIA. On the surface of it, this is poor practice, but these people are only human, and the e-mails reveal a level of antagonism and obsessive aggression from climate truthers that borders on rabid - blunt accusations of fraud and threats to involve the FBI (quite what the FBI's jurisdiction over East Anglia is is unclear) are not the most productive way to frame your approach, and it's not that surprising that a bunch of busy scientists respond to requests like this from truthers who seem determined to cherry-pick or misrepresent data with "fuck off!" As one journalist commented, "how you do science in this sort of atmosphere is beyond me."

I used the word "truthers", because the thing I find the most fascinating about this is how rapidly and rabidly the conspiracy theorists here have descended to the level of their 9/11 counterparts. We have all of the classic traits of the truther here. The obsessiveness, the insistance that something which can be interpreted many ways is somehow 'evidence' of a 'plot', the refusal to construct alternative theories, the quote-mining and cherry picking of words and data while ignoring or failing to understand the context, the painstaking attempts to find anything that can remotely be interpreted as deviating from the official story and then holding it up as proof that the consensus must be wrong. It's as tedious as it is unproductive, and it fails to inform the public.

Fortunately, these truthers share one other feature with their 9/11 counterparts - the inability to find any real evidence for there conspiracy. Until they do - which since I don't believe in a vast global climate conspiracy seems unlikely - my response to this sort of thing is the same as the response from most of the mainstream media:

"Yawn."