Yes, it shows them perusing an agenda and that’s really the crux of the issue. What separates pseudo-scientific “skeptics” from genuine, professionally-engaged skeptics is that the latter believe that there is very little, outright fraud.

I’m also an ex-scientist and I find a number of the methodologies used by climate scientists to be distasteful, misleading, and inconsistent with the scientific method and standards applied to almost every other branch of inquiry. The problem is that most of them believe that these techniques are honest tools for their discipline, rather than seeing them as massaging data in a misleading way. And that’s where the agenda comes in: you “correct” and re-normalize data until it “looks right,” rather than from first principles. The only problem is, if you think you know what that is, you’ll come to a conclusion and then rationalize the techniques you used. This is clearly shown in their correspondence. It’s not surprising, not conspiratorial and yet gets to the heart of the issue. It’s a bit like Bernard Goldberg’s theory of original media bias. There is no dark cabal of global warming, just a lot of groupthink.

The upshot is that it creates uncertainty and doubt in a field that needs serious and investigation.