By Matthew Schofield, Kansas City Star editorial columnist

The climate change emails stolen from the Unviversity of East Anglia server are something much less than a death blow to current climate science.

In fact, the more I read, the more confusing the controversy.

Now, read a few cherry-picked bits in blog post, and the emails seem pretty juicy.

Are climate scientists trying to hide bad data, using tricks to make what they've got look better, on a mission to discredit all who disagree with their purely political findings?

But take a deeper look, and it's not at all clear that any of that is going on. The scientists writing the emails routinely talk about double and triple checking their data.

There are examples of discussions on how to correct items they've got wrong, and many, many cases of explanations of why criticisms are not valid.

The writers talk about finding new, more efficient ways to run data, and do call these new methods "tricks." This is a term which has been widely criticized and which does appear throughout the emails. But there's no evidence that they were doing anything tricky with the data itself. In fact, they seem to revere the data.

As for discrediting those who question their material, go through the emails. Even when they're clearly angry at those criticizing their work, they're addressing the criticisms. The primary gripe is not that they are being criticized, but that their science is being criticized by scientists working outside the accepted norm for raising questions.

The climate scientists, in fact, seem to be more interested in getting away from responding to blogs and non-peer reviewed journals and back to the peer review process than anything else. I've seen the snippets implying they are hoping to discredit criticism inside the peer process, but those very few and clearly angry passages run counter to the overwhelming support in the emails for peer review as the only valid means to address scientific questions.

I've seen examples to the contrary, so I'll toss out a couple, and try to leave in enough to give some sense of what they read like (names have been stripped, because, after all, this is stolen property, and it's simply not fair to use names).

The first seems to counter the idea that these sceientist were intent on falsifying data.

At one point, in response to a mistake in data used in a peer-reviewed paper, one of the scientists notes: "Regarding the "upside down man", as Nick's plot shows, when flipped, the Korttajarvi series
has little impact on the overall reconstructions. Also, the series was not included in the calibration. Nonetheless, it's unfortunate that I flipped the Korttajarvi data. We used the density data as the temperature proxy, as recommended to me by ... (co-author of the original work). It's weakly inversely related to organic matter content. I should have used the inverse of density as the temperature proxy. I probably got confused by the fact that the 20th century shows very high density values and I inadvertently equated that directly with temperature."

This is pretty clearly a scientist admitting a mistake. And the scientist goes on to ask for advice on what to do about it. The discussion focuses largely on where to publish the correction. Everyone chiming in, that I've found at least, agrees they can't ignore a correction.

That doesn't mean they roll over if they disagree. On this and other topics, some of the emails have an angry tone.

But these are emails, not for publication, and reading naughty thoughts in emails in hardly news, is it? The fact is, while many might demand a politically correct world where we're all nice, all the time, that's simply a fantasy notion. People get angry when they're challenged, that goes equally for football coaches and scientists.

Consider this:

"... stood up in front of an audience of IPCC Working Group I Lead Authors and attempted to portray himself as a victim of scientific discrimination. He claimed that his 'alternative' views on the nature and causes of climate change were being ignored by the mainstream scientific community. This claim is bogus. The 'mainstream' scientific community has not ignored the "alternative" views of folks like ... The sad reality is that we've wasted an inordinate amount of time responding to the flawed science and incorrect claims of ... and his colleagues.

I'm hopeful that I won't have to waste much more time on the 'great satellite debate.' In my personal opinion, we're already well past the point of diminishing returns on this debate. The point of diminishing
returns was reached three years ago, when you overcame great obstacles to lead a fractious bunch of scientists to the successful completion of the first CCSP Report."

Now, that's hardly kind, but it's not evidence of hiding information, or ignoring criticism.

Okay, I'm not quite finished with them yet, so I am withholding a final judgement. But what I've seen thus far is far from the bombshell I'd been told to expect. However, I plan to continue to wade through them and keep an open mind.

As of this point, however, there's no there here.