We seek to understand the world, but it's made harder when part of it is hidden from us.
Leaked documents, represent a kind of ground truth, showing how the world really works. Telling us what's for sale, what the real agendas are, how powerful spies are, and how coordinated governments are. They are almost the opposite to conspiracy theories, as they present observations that can prune conspiracy theories.
But there are too many documents to read, so let's compare notes. What surprised you and caused you to update your view of the world?
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Notes -
I read all the Climategate emails back in the day. Lots of people heard about a few juicy ones that got a lot of play in the discourse (e.g. "hide the decline"). But most of them were pretty benign. Nonetheless I found it fascinating to go through and get a sense of who these people were and how they thought and what sort of things they considered normal.
What I got from it probably wouldn't be super surprising to people here, but:
The climate science community is not that big. There's an everyone-knows-everyone dynamic.
They were not terribly concerned or interested in party politics. There was not much discussion of carbon taxes or other carbon abatement policies (and to the extent they were discussed it was as often as not in a derisive tone - one scientist in particular was very frustrated that no one could see that a geoengineering solution would be necessary). One scientist said on a personal level that he hoped climate change would not be prevented, so his research could be vindicated.
They were very interested and concerned about status. There was a bit of an "under siege" mentality where they were hypersensitive and reactive to criticisms from climate sceptics, and effort and pressure applied to ensure things were not presented in a way that "gave them ammo". There was some internal argument about the extent to which this was acceptable - Keith Briffa being one guy who was more principled and opposed to misrepresenting data, with Michael Mann on the other side being particularly shameless. Others were actively obstructive of people attempting to check their work, because they didn't want mistakes to be found.
They were paranoid about rooting out any possible "closet sceptics". Any hint of maybe-kinda-scepticism was reacted against furiously - e.g. there was talk of finding a way to push out a journal editor who allowed a sceptical paper to get published, exhortations to keep certain papers out of the IPCC process by any means necessary, even redefining "peer review" to exclude them, etc.
Privately there was more acknowledgement of uncertainty and gaps in the knowledge of the climate system than you see in public - again, they deliberately presented their knowledge as more broad and more certain than they actually were, to reduce attack surface.
The big takeaway I got was to be mistrustful of experts - even to the extent they are sincere and well meaning (and some clearly were), they are likely to be operating within an ecosystem and an incentive structure that makes honesty dangerous.
I remember this one. It got reported as climate scientists hiding rising temperatures in their data, which was then trivially debunked. It was actually that they had to apply statistical obstacles to hide the fact that their proxy data was badly flawed. They had used ice core and tree ring measurements to estimate temperatures over the 2000-year period before modern records. (This was and is standard practice.) But starting at around the 1960s, when such real-world data became available, the proxy data wildly diverged. The proxy models predicted lowering temperatures, while the real-world data showed rising temperatures. So, instead of throwing out the models and truncating a 2000-year theory to a few decades, they used "Mike's Nature Trick" to "hide the decline".
As I recall, the paper discussed here was influential but not ultimately important. However, the same methodologies were used to create the famous "Hockey Stick Graph," which purported to show that global temperatures had been flat or wven mildly declining until modern industry and CO2 emissions. It was probably this graph, or the idea of this graph, that did more than anything else to convince the public that climate change was a real and present threat. I haven't seen it in a while.
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