The right-wing crazies–in the U.S., this phrase is now mostly redundant, I realize–have been going beserk about hacked e-mails from climate scientists which they believe–since they are dumb as well as crazy–reveal a vast conspiracy to manipulate data on global warming.  There is a clear explanation of what the hacked e-mails actually reveal here.

UPDATE:  This incident illustrates a more general problem, namely, when failures of the peer review process are exploited for partisan political purposes.  We've seen this, of course, in the context of th ID creationism scam.

ANOTHER:  Statements from the University of East Anglia, where the climate scientists whose e-mails were hacked work.   Dr. Jones concedes that the stolen e-mails "don't read well."  Goodness, they read better than mine–no expletives, for example.  And that scholars would be incensed when crackpots and ideological hacks sneak their work into ordinarily reputable journals is hardly surprising.