I have to disagree with the excuse. I am currently an expert witness on a civil case and they are using the emails from the parties as part of the evidence including my own over a period of three years. There is some truth that you could cherry pick a few email to twist things a bit, but even so they do paint a pretty good light of what happened, when, and why.

I don’t buy the whole “if they only looked at a few emails, then” excuse. Doesn’t pass the smell test.

I have not had much time to look at the email’s themselves, but either way I don’t think it really helps either side in the debate on global warming. Obviously the opinions of a few people are not the opinions of the thousands who are on each side of this issue.

To me this is just another distraction from the debate itself.