The debate over climate change is becoming more vitriolic by the week. The latest clash focuses on thousands of e-mails and documents, extracted by hackers from computers at the University of East Anglia, one of Britain's leading climate research centres.

Some sceptics see the electronic correspondence between UEA researchers and colleagues in the US as evidence of a vast conspiracy to overstate the scientific case for global warming and suppress contrary findings. Some scientists have defended the e-mails as legitimate private discourse of the sort that takes place in many research fields – and accused the sceptics of character assassination by quoting them out of context.

The most important point to make about the leaked correspondence is that it does not undermine the scientific case for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide to fight climate change, which is growing more rather than less compelling. None of the e-mails seized on by sceptics shows manipulation of the science itself.