With regards to the:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

This is widely publicized certainly but what Michael Mann did in his 1998 Nature paper was that he used tree ring data and proxies from other datasets to try and put together a temperature reconstruction over the past 1500 years. One of the data sets used in … See Briffa et al. (not sure of the year). This data set was problematic because it recorded accurate temperatures until 1960 at which point the tree ring data diverged from the actual measured temperatures indicating a period of cooling in a time when the Earth was known to be warming *don’t argue the validity of this claim because even skeptics admit that since 1960 it has warmed*. Briffa cautioned other scientists from using any post 1960 data because it was skewed (turns out this was due to the type of pine tree used) and thus Mike’s “trick” was he followed the author’s advice and eliminated the post 1960 portion. In order to fill in the remainder of the data he put in the actual recorded temperatures to alleviate this problem. Not exactly the conspiracy that people are looking for. And for the record, the National Academy of Sciences (2005?) went through his study, and assessed it based upon the controversy it created and they determined that his study was accurate and the data was well analyzed.

Therefore Stop using that quote until you are willing to explain or even understand the context. It is disingenuous to do so. There are plenty of other emails which are much more incriminating, don’t take the lazy quote which has clearly been explained.