Only Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has reported this as if it has more to do with climate debate, rather than the true story, which is just internet security:
""I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in any meaningful way. Just as you'd expect from bits and piece of correspondence never intended for public consumption."" ""The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the 'trick' is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term "trick" to refer to a "a good way to deal with a problem", rather than something that is "secret", and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the 'decline', it is well known that Keith Briffa's maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the "divergence problem"-see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while 'hiding' is probably a poor choice of words (since it is 'hidden' in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens." "There are some interesting documents in the hacked file. I may use them to bone up on some background when I have the time. But anyone who publishes them without permission from the authors clearly has a problem with their ethical subroutines."" http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/the_hacked_climate_science\ _ema.php?utm_source=nytwidget <http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/the_hacked_climate_scienc\ e_ema.php?utm_source=nytwidget> OffWorld
