Dr. Phil Mote, who directs the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI), sent around an email listing two places to get some thorough and reasonably-balanced perspectives on the incident: Wikipedia posting and Ben Santer's open letter to a NYT blog.
Phil also included some words of his own:
By now you've probably heard about the incident a couple of weeks ago
in which some emails, data files, and fortran source code were stolen
from the University of East Anglia (UK) Climate Research Unit and
uploaded to various web sites. The correspondence is being used to
claim that CRU and other climate scientists were manipulating data to
exaggerate global warming and colluding to prevent skeptics from
having a voice. While some of the personal comments about skeptics
are embarrassing, the incident primarily represents woeful
misrepresentation of the scientists' words (e.g., where 'trick' was
used to mean 'clever way to solve a problem', not 'deception') has
been blown out of all proportion.
Furthermore, few if any of the scientific conclusions on global
warming rests on the matters discussed. The fact is that two other
research centers (NASA GISS and National Climatic Data Center) have
performed their own analyses fairly independently over the years and
they all reach virtually the same conclusions.
"If you can't prove apocalypse is nigh, at least now nobody can prove it isn't." -- New York Post
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