Global warming scientific consensus reaffirmed in popular press

In response to a hacked theft of thousands of emails from a British research center, an attack which implicitly challenges the idealism of scientists studying climate, three of our most popular science publications have rushed to reaffirm the scientific consensus on the subject.

Yes, global warming is a reality on the planet today, unfortunately. 

It's not news, but it's still true.

In Scientific American, in a piece called Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense:

1998 was the world's warmest year in the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s records; recent years have been cooler; therefore, the previous century's global warming trend is over, right?

Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be
able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended
duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations
in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the
temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade's worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern, climatologists say.

Recently, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein asked four
independent statisticians to look for trends in the temperature data
sets without telling them what the numbers represented. "The experts found no true temperature declines over time," he wrote.

In the NewScientist, in a piece called Why there's no sign of a conspiracy in hacked emails: 

Forget about the temperature records compiled by
researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out
into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves
unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on.
Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and
you'll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

You
can't fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on
mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or
shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration
times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or
ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow
occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level
rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.

None
of these observations by themselves prove the world is warming; they
could simply be regional effects, for instance. But put all the data
from around the world together, and you have overwhelming evidence of a long-term warming trend.

And in Popular Mechanics:

Climate Science Not a House of Cards

Perhaps the most worrisome part of this incident is that it could
easily leave the public wondering about the science of human-induced
global warming. But do the potentially unethical acts implied by these
e-mails invalidate the hypothesis that human output of greenhouse
gases, most notably CO₂, creates a serious risk of rapid climate change? No.

Outspoken critics often portray climate science as a house of
cards, built on a shaky edifice of limited data and broad suppositions.
However, it's more realistic to think of the science as a deck of
cards, spread out, face up. Some data and interpretations of those data
are more certain than others, of course. But pulling out one or two
interpretations, or the results of a few scientists, does not change
the overall picture. Take away two or three cards, and there are still
49 or 50 cards facing you.

The "house of cards" view results partly from the representation
of human-induced climate change in opinion polls and in the press,
which split the debate into "believers" and "skeptics." This dichotomy
is misleading for many reasons, particularly because it implies that
those who are concerned about human-induced climate change believe
every single claim made by every scientist on this topic, in the way
that some fundamentalists claim to believe in the literal truth of
every word in a religious text. Similarly, it implies that all skeptics
doubt the entire theory.

Could this attack by unknown hackers on the climate consensus turn out to be self-defeating?

It certainly seems to have brought out the worst from the denier community.

Centrist (and former right-winger) Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs links to an astonishing BBC confrontation between a flack for the Senate's most prominent denier, Mark Morano, and an English scientist in East Anglia. It's a scene some are calling Climategate vs. Arseholegate. Worth a look: