Details are all over the web, but in summary they destroy the credibility of a leading climate change Cassandra, Professor Phil Jones. They reveal him in turn to be conspiring to suppress papers by climate change sceptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow", he writes), conspiring to marginalise a journal which had published papers by sceptics ("I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor"), trying to downplay the extent of the Mediaeval Warm Period on the basis of a "gut feeling, no science", threatening to resist Freedom of Information requests to reveal data even to the extent of destroying it, and proposing a "trick" to substitute one set of data for another in a publication. More extraordinary still they show him corresponding with a colleague baffled at absence of recent warming ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... ").
So should we stop worrying? Probably not. The people revealed by these leaks to be manipulative anti-scientists are not the only ones working in the field. They are merely some of the most influential. I do realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I was in the Alps in the summer and I saw with my own eyes how the glaciers were retreating.
But hasn't the climate always changed? Didn't we have glaciers in Scotland at the end of the 19th Century? Hasn't humanity has always managed to adapt, hating change at the same time as being really good at dealing with it? And though the science is persuasive, can we really be sure that humanity is actually responsible for global warming? What if it's just nature? And shouldn't we be worrying about the next ice age instead?
On the whole I, like Professor Jones, would rather keep the Climate Change gravy train going. Not because my department's funding and my reputation depends on it, but because it offers the best hope of getting out of the ludicrous cycle of consumption and over-population which besets Western society, wrecking natural habitats and turning us all into mall-zombies.
But when that arch clown George Monbiot apologises in the Guardian today for misleading his readers, revealing himself unexpectedly to be a bigger man by far than Thierry Henry, the handball cheat whose manual assist got France into the World Cup finals and kept the Irish out, you know that something truly extraordinary has happened.
