Quick Fact: Fox News' Scott claims hacked emails "suggest some scientists manipulate data on global warming"

From the November 25 edition of Fox News' Happening Now:

SCOTT: Scientists researching climate change have their emails hacked, and some of the mail suggests some scientists manipulate data on global warming. One of them reads, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." This is a controversy rocking the scientific community right now. [Happening Now, 11/25/09]

Jones' email was distorted, "pulled out of context"

Numerous climate scientists have explained that the purportedly offensive terms have been taken out of context. Several climate scientists have criticized efforts to take Jones' email out of context. In a November 20 post, Real Climate's staff, which is made up of several working climate scientists, cited Jones' 1999 email -- which Scott read -- as "[o]ne example" of "instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded 'gotcha' phrases [being] pulled out of context." Moreover, a November 20 Guardian article reported that Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said of Jones' email: "It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating. ... You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something -- a short cut can be a trick." Further, RealClimate.org explained that "[s]cientists often use the term 'trick' to refer to a 'a good way to deal with a problem,' " and that "hiding the decline" refers to a method that is "completely appropriate."