"The Unchained Goddess" (1958), produced by Fritz Capra for the Bell Laboratories. "Even now, Man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release through factories and automobiles every year of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide, which helps air absorb heat from the sun, our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer! "

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In early March, The Washington Times published an exchange of e-mails between U.S. environmental scientists. The right-wing group Competitive Enterprise Institute has since been re-distributing the e-mails in a press release with the incindiary title "Climategate Reloaded: Plots, politics, and predetermined outcomes." 

Dr. Paul G. Falkowski, a marine researcher at Rutgers University, was one of the e-mail authors. Since The Washington Times published the messages, "I've gotten incredible hate mail," he told me, "attacking me as a person, scientists in general...just at the borderline of threatening."

He's worried that it's becoming impossible to spark a rational dialogue about issues where science reveals facts that are important for society.  

So, what is the terrible plot that these evil scientists tried to put over on a gullible nation?

Placing an ad in a newspaper.

In the e-mail conversation, which took place on a mailing list of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), earth scientists were debating how to improve the public's understanding of global climate change science. Dr. Falkowski urged colleagues to raise funds to pay for a large advertisement that would the record on their work, to run in The New York Times.

"Essentially we are trying to discredit the lies and disinformation about climate change research, and science in general," Dr. Falkowski told me last week. "I want to make NAS a transformative agent, and stand up against intolerance of basic facts."

The messages were "from a confidential, we thought secure e-mail listserv for NAS Section 63," the academy's environmental sciences and ecology group, he said, explaining that e-mail on NAS section lists "are by honor not leaked or disclosed outside." "We have to have a discussion that is quite confidential," he said, "about candidates and other issues confidential within the academy, which is not a government organization."

"We don't know how it got to The Washington Times."

(Unlike last year's hacked e-mail messages from the UK's University of East Anglia, however, this incident is very unlikely to rise to the level of a criminal investigation -- because it was a leak, rather than a theft.)

Dr. Falkowski's ad idea didn't meet universal approval. One colleague suggested that "a well-planned and publicized symposium would have more impact than an ad in the NYT."

But no one disagreed, in the words of this same writer, that "the publicity surrounding the hacking and its aftermath has had a devastating effect on the attitudes of the average citizens I call my friends and neighbors."

"Even worse," this scientist continues, "I am seeing formerly committed public sector leaders backing off from positions aimed at reducing our fossil fuel dependence."

So they may disagree on how to do outreach.  But, Dr. Falkowski told me, he and his colleagues want the public to know that they agree with the fundamental conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Human actions are far and away the most likely cause of global climate change, and are bringing about severe disruptions of the world's climate, weather, and environment. 

Competitive Enterprise Institute, the group that's been flogging the e-mails as proof of a conspiracy, has been working for over a decade to create fear, uncertainty and misunderstanding about global climate change, as well as environmental science, and to derail climate and energy policy reform.

Some of these efforts have been paid for by millions of dollars in funding that reportedly includes contributions from fossil energy interests and auto corporations, including ExxonMobil, Amoco, Texaco, Ford, and the American Petroleum Institute.

So it's a "pot, meet kettle" moment to see this group accusing others of plotting to advance predetermined outcomes.

Dr. Falkowski stands by his words.  "There's nothing said in those e-mails that I'd retract," says the Rutgers scientist. "It wasn't meant for the public, but if [the messages] are out there, let them read the whole thing."