Global Warmingists are in full-blown spin control. Let's take a look at what is being said; examine the calibre of argument.

Guardian's George Monbiot:

The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming...

Monbiot has good motivations. In contrast, every global warming skeptic is an intentional liar, disinterested in truth.

Obligatory ad hominem fallacy: Check!

... insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.

Citation? None provided of course. One prominent example would be lovely.

Most people I've read say the e-mails demonstrate a willingness to distort and hide data. And indeed, they have. As these were the main scientists behind the UN's assessment, their motives and ethics indeed should also, reasonably, cast some doubt on the results.

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850...

Monbiot oddly links to an article which undermines his own contention, noting that the temperature record he cites "draws heavily on CRU analysis. CRU supplied all the land temperature data." Monbiot also doesn't mention the HARRY_README.TXT file, which shows said land temperature data was apparently totally unreliable and irreproducible. Nor does he mention the CRU's odd "loss" of all known historical temperature data when asked to release it. Nor subsequent evidence that CRU and NOAA cherry-picked Russian and Canadian land station data.

The article he links also admits: "The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics." So Monbiot cites this article as proof of the reliability of the historical temperature record, but the article its implies it's probably fried? Has he read his own best evidence?

... in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice...

Which glaciers? The most recent revelation is that the many of the "shirking" glaciers in question most certainly aren't. Which sea ice? Actual scientific records show it's roughly holding steady since 1979.

... in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

Which "responses"? Examples please?

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense...

Ah. No other theory makes sense, so it MUST have been CO2. Boy, that's science in action, isn't it?

Never mind that global CO2 was hardly being affected by industrial sources back in 1850; also never mind recent evidence pointing to no net change in atmospheric CO2 since 1850 (article recently renamed to make conclusion seem more ambiguous) .

The third observation is the contrast between the global scandal these emails have provoked and the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. I have placed on the Guardian's website four case studies; each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works.... Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit's server is one tenth as bad as the least of these revelations.

1. The implicit logic here is "I can find someone who lied against global warming, therefore it's true"? Huh? I thought he opposed such fallacies.

2. Please, by all means, read the examples. It's pretty tepid stuff: a coal company wants to "reposition global warming as theory"! (Al Gore or UN officials would never do the converse, right?) A single AGW-skeptical scientist received some funding from an electric power consortium? (No pro-AGW scientist has ever received money for supporting global warming, surely? — how about every single one with a government grant?) A think tank published a list of global-warming-sceptics which included some incorrect names (yet the UN's list of signatories has the same problem — scientists who disagree, like Dr. Chris Landsea, cannot get their names removed.) And finally, horror of horrors, a man of some influence in the Bush administration, skeptical of AGW, was found to have indirect links to Exxon! (Did Monbiot even notice that Jeffery Immelt, CEO of GE, who stands to make billions from confirming global warming — is also one of Obama's top advisors? No, that's nothing compared to a minor Bush official's influence.)

As I imply with the counter-examples noted above, the opposite cases are far more pervasive and lucrative — if Monbiot thinks such influences can corrupt a scientific position, he should be overwhelmed by the temptations which could lead one to a pro-warming stance. But it seems he's utterly blind to such.

3. None of this rises to the level of supposedly objective scientists — whose work supposedly forms the entire world's "consensus" position — destroying, losing, and hiding inconvenient evidence.

Elsewhere, Monbiot charges:

They stoutly ignore far graver evidence of falsification and fabrication by their own side, even when there is smoking gun evidence that their champions have secretly taken money...

Um, I'm not "ignoring" such evidence at all. I just don't see how some petition having a few false signatories on it does anything to negate the head of the UN's IPCC taking money to say that glaciers were melting when, in fact, they weren't. The later sheds doubt on a specific "finding", the former does nothing of the sort.

They make no attempt to hold each other to account or to sustain any standards of truth at all.

The four examples Monbiot gave were fairly obscure; I follow this debate pretty closely, and I'd never heard of any of said incidents, much less been influenced by them before they were "exposed". And the behavior he cites is mostly ethical (e.g. there's nothing immoral about a company wanting to argue its case in public) so I'm not sure what's to condemn in most cases. And, contrary to his "no accountability" claim, the case he cited with a clear, intentional ethical conflict — the Bush administration official — was actually fired. (Again, does he read his own stuff?)

Guardian's Fred Pearce offers a few more attempts:

If those journalists had read even a few words beyond the soundbites, they would have realised that they were often being fed lies.... The most quoted "climategate" soundbite comes from an email from Prof Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to Prof Mike Mann of the University of Virginia in 1999, in which he discussed using "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline". The phrase has been widely spun as an effort to prevent the truth getting out that global temperatures had stopped rising...

He's right that "hide the decline", in context, referred specifically and only to truncating a series of tree-ring data, so that the resulting graph wouldn't show a downward trend after 1961. But, um, shouldn't that alone be a troubling indication of cherry-picking? Not for a true believer, apparently.

I don't think most the media, pro- or con-, realizes this distinction (and thus aren't "lying" but are merely mistaken) — which may not matter much anyway, given the other subterfuges revealed in the letters, and subsequent exposures of IPCC fraud...

Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to write: "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." ... Unlike Jones, Trenberth's remark from October 2009 was indeed about the slackening of the warming trend that some like to interpret as cooling.

Um, no: technically, what we have is an absolute drop in temperature (normally termed "cooling"!) which some like to interpret (wrongly) as a "slackening of the warming trend." If you have a peak in 1998, then by definition, temperatures have fallen since then. This isn't some odd usage specific to global warming: it the the normal meaning of all the words we're using here. Fred Pearce wishes to avoid such, apparently.

That much is agreed. But Inhofe and other sceptics latched on to Trenberth's "travesty" phrase as a revelation that scientists were trying to keep cooling secret because it undermined their arguments about global warming.

Um, no, again. The shocking point is that Trenberth was privately admitting there's cooling, and admitting it doesn't agree with the models; it wasn't predicted at all. This, in turn, casts significant doubt on the reliability of the touted computer models which supposedly "prove" future warming trends. Which would indeed certainly "undermine" their position — I don't see what's dishonest about that at all.

In another case George Will, celebrated in some circles as an intellectual, told ABC's This Week programme that Mann had said in an email that he wished to "delete, get rid of, the medieval warming period". No such words appear anywhere in the emails. What Mann actually said was that "it would be nice to try to 'contain' the putative 'MWP'". Some bloggers suggested this amounted to extinguishing it from the data record. But an intellectual like Will should have known that, in this context, "contain" means to understand its dimensions...

Oh! Yes, I see now. That's the usual usage: when you "contain" a phenomenon, it means to understand it! Like when the CDC says we should "contain" an outbreak of disease, they mean they only want to "understand" it. Someone should really inform the dictionary people, as they seem to think it means "keep within limits"; "to prevent from advancing". (Stupid dictionary people!)

And never mind that Mann's now-widely-discredited hockey-stick graph is a textbook example of getting rid of unwanted effects: "Jan Esper, David Frank and Robert Wilson (EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 2004) further argued that the fatal flaw with Mann, Bradley and Hughes' temperature reconstruction is its incorrect representation of longer-term trends. They observed that the statistical methods used inappropriately remove trends over long time periods."

No, nothing to see here! Move along.

Mann explained as much to anyone who asked. Verdict: not guilty.

Oh, Mann said that he wasn't working to hide the medieval warming trend? Gee, I guess that settles it completely! Forget completely what independent research demonstrated, above. How can you argue with steel, vice-like logic like this? Case closed! I'm sorry I ever entertained a single doubt!

Too bad "deniers" aren't afforded the same assumptions of good faith and intentions.