Has 'Climategate' Been Overblown?

The controversy over hacked e-mails from the world's leading climate scientists continues to roil. Here's what the e-mails say about the reality of global warming

Johan Spanner / The New York Times / Redux

The e-mail dispute has disrupted the Copenhagen climate summit.

The controversy over e-mails stolen from global-warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.

Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as "Climategate," with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it "Swifthack," a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Senator John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal...

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