Check out this video from Pajamas TV that summarizes a recent Congressional hearing in which GOP members pressed Obama’s science adviser and Climategate co-conspirator John Holdren on Climategate. Holdren was forced to concede much ground, but fell back on the “this doesn’t dispove global warming” line. That defense, however, begs the question; it assumes the current warming is unusual, and the whole impact of the e-mails is to call that assumption into question.
In fact, the e-mails are now causing some to question the recent temperature data. See, for example, this excellent summary by Willis Eschenbach. If the CRU team “added value” to the data by introducing non-existent warming trends, then we really do need to start again, examining the data from scratch.