"Who can forget Phil Jones writing to Michael Mann on 8 July 2004 ‘can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/07/hacked-c...)
I don't love playing fast and loose on a particular paper, but (1) I don't fault them for not wanting climate skeptics to be able to launder the prestige of being published in the IPCC to lend credibility denier narratives, (2) nothing about this changes the IPCC conclusion or the underlying reality of global warming and (3) if all you present is this one-off without context, it serves to spread the false impression that climate science writ large is uncertain.
Spreading that form of uncertainty without the benefit of context serves the purpose of spreading misinformation. That's the topline, and losing track of that topline is a failure in media literacy.
If we stick to the climategate issue rather than commenting on our beliefs in validity of climate science as represented by the conclusions in the IPCC reports; again, these statements are standing on their own as a witness on the attitude of those authors which you cannot get from the sanitized wiki article.
Yikes. Suppressing scientific skepticism has always gone so well in the past.
The missing skill is being able to focus to fit one-off details into big-picture context, and communication styles based on exchanges of small snippets are good at spreading misinformation because they prevent the big picture cohesion from getting off the ground.