With the UN conference on climate change set to open in Durban next week, 5,000 emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, have been uploaded to a Russian server. They seem to show climate scientists acting with a partiality that is alien to the scientific method. One of them worries that climate change "is being manipulated to put a political spin on it". Another notes, regarding a planned study of tornadoes, that "getting people we know and trust is vital".
The emails are from the same trove as those released before the Copenhagen summit in 2009. That earlier batch included an email in which Prof Phil Jones of UEA suggested to Michael Mann of UPenn that he delete certain emails, and another in which a professor discussed bullying a journal that had published a dissenting paper. Those sympathetic to the fight against climate change have dismissed the importance of the leaks. They are wrong. The emails weakened public support for the climate change fight. In the US they probably killed it.
Americans are running out of patience with climate change campaigning. The Pew Research Center recently asked Americans about a list of 22 "top policy priorities". Climate change came almost last, behind issues like moral decline, purging the political system of lobbyists and simplifying the tax code. The only issue voters considered less worthy of Washington's attention was obesity - and one can see in any mall how little Americans are bothered by that.
Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public's radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama's 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government's environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. "Green energy" has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
Should they have been? Defenders of the professors say no. While some of the email scientists were partisan, panels have cleared them of practising corrupt science. All the emails have shown is that scientists are no less prone to vanity, rivalries and corner-cutting than people in other walks of life.
But that is everything. Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists' claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist's furtiveness on the grounds that "his science is good" is like defending a politician's blunder on the grounds that he "did nothing illegal". The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists' claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. When Prof Mann tells The Guardian that the email leaks are "right out of the tried-and-true playbook of climate change denial", he is correct. But he is also open to the retort that he would say that, wouldn't he?
Until the replacement of the Italian government earlier this month, the climate change establishment was probably the most robust technocracy in the west. But the case for setting up anti-global warming protocols has weakened. Europe "led by example" in passing the Kyoto protocol in the 1990s, but its other great construction of the era, the euro, is not now adding to its prestige. The public has grown weary of being scared into surrendering rights and money - whether through the Troubled Asset Relief Programme in the US or the European Financial Stability Facility. Technocracies are inherently fragile because their legitimacy rests on the denial of a universal truth: everybody makes mistakes.