With ice caps melting, seas growing warmer, and coastlines shrinking, it’s apparent that the effects of global climate change can be dramatic. But who knew it could be such a soap opera?

Thanks to the well-timed release of a few hundred megabytes of e-mail hacked from a university in the United Kingdom, the debate on human-caused climate change has gone from he-said, she-said to a spectacle replete with deception, conflict, and chicanery.

The scene was set November 20, when anonymous hackers allegedly breached a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted the director’s e-mail and other data on the Internet, according to the initial story in the Guardian. The stolen correspondence has been interpreted by Internet commentators as everything from proof of a climate action conspiracy to nothing more than healthy, informal debate taken out of context, according to an account in the New York Times.

“It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” the Times quoted climate expert Michael Mann as saying.

An e-mail trail from CRU Director Phil Jones to and about Mann are among the most cited and damning of more than 1,000 messages, including a reference to “Mike’s trick” to hide a decline in temperatures. Jones and Mann also requested that researchers thwart freedom of information requests and blacklist a journal that challenged their take on warming, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Although the messages have not been confirmed as authentic, the flap has caused Jones to step down as CRU director, according to the Washington Post.

Regardless of the how the kerfuffle shakes up the science community, its impacts are likely to reinforce factions in an already doubting public, which sees the climate debate more as a function of politics than science, according to a Washington Post article. Political posturing surrounding the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks and a U.S. cap-and-trade bill with likely further the divide.

“It's a sad state of affairs when science becomes subject to partisan politics,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told the Post. “It can only be attributed to the sense that this issue has become part of a political battle.”

A Washington Post-ABC poll found that American “belief” in global warming had dropped 80 to 72 percent in the last year, according to the article. Still, many in the know say the science is there, despite a few rash communications (for a discussion of responses from the science community and a link to the cache of pilfered e-mails, check out this post on the Christian Science Monitor’s Bright Green Blog).

“Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” NASA climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt told the New York Times. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”