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This is a guest post by Mike Casey, cross-posted from ScalingGreen.com.
Despite overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and accelerating, the theft of the East Anglia emails a year ago was turned into “Climategate” by the dirty energy lobby.  This non-scandal was nothing but a bunch of hot air, perpetrated by “deniers,” and to a large extend funded by the leading dirty energy (coal and oil) industries. (For more on this subject, see the superb book, “The Climate War,” by Eric Pooley.)

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A blog post penned by The Atlantic’s Clive Crook today highlights just how hard it is for some people to admit when they are wrong.

Maybe it’s a pride thing - the Chinese call it “saving face.” Maybe it’s something entirely different. After all, who knows what is running through anyone’s head?

Regardless of what it is called, Crook has it in spades on the issue of the infamous stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at London’s East Anglia University. At the time of the controversy last November, Crook wrote column after column indicting climate scientists in the court of public opinion before any inquiry into the matter could take place.

Only 13 days after the stolen emails were made public Crook had already made up his mind writing that, “the stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

But after three inquires into the so-called “climate gate” matter, one of them conducted by a bi-partisan UK government committee and two by academic boards, the overwhelming conclusion is that there was no wrong-doing.

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In his “exclusive” story, titled “Top Climate Scientist’s Exoneration Won’t Be the Last Word,” Fox News’ Ed Barnes suggests that the Penn State investigation that cleared Dr. Michael Mann of any wrong-doing was a “whitewash” designed to protect the “millions of dollars in grant money it gets by having Mann on the faculty.”

Barnes claims that Penn State’s decision to exonerate Mann generated “a storm of controversy” and “came under severe attack.”  Reading his inflammatory language, you might think that a whole lot of academics and scientists ridiculed the inquiry.  Who is this angry mob that generated such a “storm of controversy?” 

Actually, the Barnes storm is comprised of only three people - a mining executive, the wealthiest member of Congress, and a former FoxNews.com columnist.

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Fred Pearce at The Guardian has produced a brilliant, 12-part series on the circumstances and implications of the email theft from the University of East Anglia.

The series tracks the whole story and is bluntly critical in its analysis and treatment of some of the now-embarrassed climate scientists who featured the emails. Pearce also looks gingerly at the likely suspects among those who may have been involved in the thefts and who, at the very least, were aggressive in disseminating the emails.

Most importantly, Pearce puts the whole sideshow into context, saying “Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet.” And later, “Humanity is still to blame. And we still, urgently, need to do something about it.”

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The Daily Mail is reporting that it might be, “Chinese hackers linked to ‘Warmergate’ climate change leaked emails controversy.”

The Mail’s revelation came about after they tracked a convoluted trail of IP (internet Protocols) addresses, through to a, ” Chinese environmental institute, the Research Institute of Forest Ecology and Environment Protection, based near Beijing.”

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At least one of the scientists being accused by industry groups and right-wing think tanks of hiding their climate research data, appears in an email we found in the stolen files to be more than happy with sharing his data.

Not only does he share it, but he does so with a person he’s never even met before!

Now that our research team has completed a thorough analysis of the entire 1000+ email record, we’ll be publishing a lot of the information in the coming days that runs counter to the claims made by those using these leaked emails to further their own political agendas.

Here’s one we came across between East Anglia researcher, Dr. Keith Briffa and a Russian scientist, Leonid Klyashtorin, in which Briffa gladly sends along research data to Kylashotrin, a person he has never met: