I've been doing a bit of research on climate change for my CNN appearance tomorrow...

And it's been very interesting. I'm going on Howie Kurtz's show on CNN tomorrow (Sunday), I think our "hit time" is around 10:40am Eastern. We'll be talking about the climate change debate, and Sarah Palin's op ed and Al Gore's interview, and then we'll also discuss press coverage of Obama's Nobel.

I did a bit of research on something in particular - the claim by climate change denialists that some stolen emails from climate change scientists in Britain "prove" that climate change is a hoax. Well guess what - it doesn't prove that it's a hoax, and in fact both AP and FactCheck.org agree on this one. Climate change is real, and the emails do nothing to change that fact.

AP:

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Factcheck.org:

Hacked e-mails show climate scientists in a bad light but don't change scientific consensus on global warming....

The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.

Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.

E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.