Decent diary at Open left that I think nails the situation, and also uses the fabulous term ‘right wing puke funnel’:

This is the (international) right wing puke funnel in action, trying to mainstream a climate science scandal. It also reeks of a classic orchestrated PR disinformation strategy. They’ve dubbed the CRU-hack as “climategate”, and so using their fabricated scandal, create an imagined link to the NIWA data adjustment as “New Zealand’s Climategate” despite there being no connection whatsoever between the two. The idea could be that by laying the groundwork with the CRU hack, now the denialists are trying to dribble out “see, another lying climate scientist” stories ahead of the Copenhagen summit. Each story on its own is meritless, but in a death of a thousand cuts, the cumulative effect is to damage the public perception of climate scientists as sincere people.

The principle behind this has a plausible basis in psychology, where papers like this have found that negative information has a persistent effect on one’s perception of a subject, even after that negative information is proven incorrect.

Moreover, the older basis of using false attacks was the knowledge that the people who see the initial attack, don’t always see the rebuttal that disproves it. So 10 people hear the false charge, and 8 of them hear the rebuttal, leaving 2 who still believe the charge to be true.

The Puke Funnel is trying to disrupt Copenhagen; the CRU Hack story continues

The deniers don’t care if what they say is false, and don’t care about issuing corrections—they’ll move on to the next nontroversy, secure in the knowledge that there will be that 20 percent who will still believe the charge to be true, regardless of how ridiculous.

In many respects this seems to be the guiding principle behind the wingnut-sphere of late (and even some in the GOP) on many things.