In the stolen climatologists’ email story, the latest claim making the rounds of the right wing blogs (originating at Britain’s right wing paper the Daily Mail) is that a BBC correspondent was sent the stolen emails a month before they were made public.

Sounds juicy, doesn’t it? So juicy that at least half a dozen right wing bloggers took the story and ran with it, ranting that the BBC covered up the stolen emails even though they knew about them over a month ago.

Just one little problem. The Daily Mail article was completely wrong.

Paul Hudson, the BBC correspondent in question, explains that he was asked to confirm the authenticity of one of the emails, sent on October 12th, that included quotes from previous emails: BBC - Paul Hudson’s Blog: ‘Climategate’ - What next?

As you may know, some of the e-mails that were released last week directly involved me and one of my previous blogs, ‘Whatever happened to global warming ?’

These took the form of complaints about its content, and I was copied in to them at the time. Complaints and criticisms of output are an every day part of life, and as such were nothing out of the ordinary. However I felt that seeing there was an ongoing debate as to the authenticity of the hacked e-mails, I was duty bound to point out that as I had read the original e-mails, then at least these were authentic, although of course I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the others.

The Daily Mail article took this sentence from a previous post by Hudson, and either misinterpreted it or deliberately distorted it:

I was forwarded the chain of emails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the world’s leading climate scientists written as a direct result of my article “Whatever Happened To Global Warming”.

By “chain of emails,” Hudson is referring to the quoted emails contained within the one he was sent.

Since many of the stolen emails released last week were written after October 12th, there’s no way that Hudson could have been sent the package at that time. The fact that neither the Daily Mail nor the numerous bloggers who posted about this false story even noticed this discrepancy is evidence of their increasingly desperate efforts to keep this bogus “scandal” in the news.

Will the Daily Mail and the bloggers who shouted that this was “more proof of a cover-up!” now post corrections? Don’t hold your breath.

(Hat tip: Deltoid.)