John at Powerlineblog is analyzing the climate alarmists' emails

and is focusing on a few incriminating series of emails. His first post, Global Warming Bombshell, outlines the circumstance:

Someone hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre, one of the main centers of anthropogenic global warming research. The hacker downloaded 62 megabytes of data from the server, consisting of around 1,000 emails and a variety of other documents. He uploaded them to an FTP server, where they were available to the public, apparently, for only a few hours.
[...]
I downloaded all of the material earlier today and have begun to review it. The emails are stunning. They are authored by many of the leading figures in the global warming movement: Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Stephen Schneider, and others. They are remarkably candid; these individuals talk to each other with the knowledge that they are among friends.

The emails I've reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax. On the contrary, they are true believers. [...] But the emails are disturbing nonetheless. What they reveal, more than anything, is a bunker mentality.
[...]
They also suggest that pro-global warming scientists fudge data to get the results they are looking for.
[...]
No wonder pro-global warming scientists are dogmatically committed to their theory, no matter what the data say: their livelihoods, as well as their professional reputations, depend on it. As a result, they conduct themselves like a secret cabal. Outsiders--that is to say, independent thinkers--are viewed with suspicion.

The conclusion of his post, The Alarmists Do "Science", a Case Study:

Tree ring studies are vitally important to the conclusions reached by the U.N.'s IPCC report, which is the main foundation for the claim that anthropogenic global warming has been "proved." That being the case, one would think that Briffa, one of the two or three primary authors of the tree ring studies, would have a ready response to these very basic questions. But no: he did not reply to Dr. Keiller's email.
[...]
As far as I can tell from the email archive, Briffa never did respond to the plant scientist. Jones's email warning Briffa to be "very wary about responding to this person now having seen what McIntyre has put up" was written just three weeks ago. It, along with the rest of the email archive, makes an utter mockery of the alarmists' claim that the science of global warming is settled in their favor.

On the contrary, the conclusion an observer is likely to draw from the CRU archive is that the climate alarmists are making up the science as they go along and are fitting facts to reach a predetermined conclusion rather than objectively seeking after truth. What they are doing is politics, not science. When I was in law school, this story was told about accountants: A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, "What is two plus two?" The first two candidates answer, "Four." They don't get the job. The third responds, "What do you want it to be?" He gets hired. The climate alarmists' attitude toward data appears to me much the same as that fictional accountant's attitude toward arithmetic.

The conclusion of his post, When In Doubt, Delete:

These emails appear to show that, when faced with a legitimate request under Britain's Freedom of Information Act, these global warming alarmists preferred to delete their emails with one another about the crucially important IPCC report--the main basis for the purported "consensus" in favor of anthropogenic global warming--rather than allow them to come to light. This is one of many instances in the East Anglia documents where the global warming alarmists act like a gang of co-conspirators rather than respectable scientists.