The release of a series of e-mails apparently stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was timed so that they would hit the news immediately before the Copenhagen climate conference. They didn't seem to affect the conference itself (where deals appear to have collapsed under their own weight), but they did spawn over a half-dozen inquiries, all of which cleared the researchers of anything other than a cavalier attitude towards the UK's Freedom of Information Act. Nevertheless, whoever was behind that original release has loosed another batch in advance of this year's Durban climate meeting.

The last time out, only Saudi Arabia seemed to reference the contents of the e-mails at the Copenhagen meeting itself. And this time, indications are that a significant agreement is very unlikely, so it's not obvious that the e-mail release will even register. This is especially true because the e-mails have come from the same stash as the original batch. And, in the mean time, multiple inquiries have concluded that the e-mails didn't raise questions about the validity of climate science, although individual researchers displayed a cavalier attitude towards sharing data and Freedom of Information Act requests.

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