Last Thursday unknown individual(s) released 120 MB of files and correspondence from a climate research group in Britain. This has lead to a bit of fervor amongst rabid skeptics such as Hiding evidence of global cooling: Junk science exposed among climate-change believers. Never mind that last month the Associated Press reported that statisticians have rejected global cooling, or that the “incriminating files” are from a single laboratory among hundreds around the world.

The claim by those involved that selected documents were made public in order to support the skeptics views seems reasonable. Afterall, consider what an arbitrary selection of your own files and email might portray (probably pretty boring stuff about lunch plans, TPS reports, SPAM and the occasional forwarded joke) versus a set chosen by an enemy or jilted lover¹. However, the leaked records may still prove to be damning, though not in the manner the hacker hoped, as they do provide evidence of slightly less than stellar sportsmanship.

For those interested, it seems you can download the files at WikiLeaks and search the plain text files at the skeptic-sponsored site East Anglia Mails.

^{1. “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu}