A trove of leaked private e-mails to and from leading climate researchers has revealed a shocking and unexpected truth: Scientists are human.

They collaborate on problems in their work, use intemperate language about their critics and worry about making mistakes.

The e-mails, some dating back 13 years, were stolen from a university server in England and posted on the Internet last week. Climate change deniers are hailing them as a "smoking gun" — though exactly what they are supposed to demonstrate seems a bit unclear.

Many of the e-mails discuss technical problems or point to gaps in evidence. Others are unabashedly critical of scientists who, the researchers say, misstate data or reach faulty conclusions.

And some, such as a message that refers to opponents as "idiots," or another with a photo collage depicting leading global warming deniers on a melting iceberg, frankly are juvenile.

It's easy to get lost in the details of any scientific debate, which is why it helps to keep your eye on the big picture. Evidence for global climate change is, quite simply, overwhelming. It includes:

— Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, now at their highest levels in 800,000 years.

— Global average temperatures, which show that the 20th century was the warmest on record, and the years since 2000 were even warmer.

— Melting Arctic sea ice, which since 1980 has declined from about 7 million square kilometers to slightly more than 5 million.

— Rising sea levels, which since 1993 have grown at twice the historical average.

None of that has been seriously challenged. The purloined e-mails focus on more prosaic matters.

Global warming deniers say that in some, scientists discuss deleting e-mails to avoid a Sunshine Law request for their raw data.

That's not behavior we condone. It shows that even top scientists could learn from political leaders, who have far more sophisticated methods to prevent disclosure.

Deniers point in particular to an e-mail in which a leading researcher describes using a "trick" to "hide" certain data. The researcher, Phil Jones, a British climatologist, was referring to a study that integrated historic records with indirect evidence of global temperatures from things like tree rings and ice cores.

The "trick" involved integrating tree-ring data, which conflicts with historic temperature readings after 1960, with the rest of the evidence. The same "trick" also was used by another researcher to produce what is sometimes called the "hockey stick" graph. It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years, with a sharp increase beginning in the 1990s.

But the "hockey stick" graph was vetted by the National Academies of Science, which endorsed the methods used to create it. The problem of integrating tree-ring data with information from other sources was widely recognized and discussed at the time Mr. Jones published his research and when the Academies reviewed the hockey stick graph. The "trick" wasn't hidden, and it wasn't secret.

What's left is a collection of supposedly private e-mails in which scientists behave badly, not a refutation of the science of climate change.

Luckily, science doesn't depend on the behavior of scientists for its authority. If it did, we would not have the theory of gravity, whose foundation was laid by Sir Isaac Newton, a man who badly overreacted to critics and dabbled in alchemy.

In the end, it's the totality of data that matters. Unfortunately for global warming deniers, that evidence is stacked against

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