Now I'm happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism.
Good, legitimate criticism is difficult when you find out that one side has been manipulating data, deleting data, strong-arming publications and otherwise engaging in questionable behavior in order to sabotage the opposing side.
The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn't even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of 'disproval' of global warming (which wouldn't have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they're simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate.
Interesting, because the climate scientists who have been caught out in this scandal seem to be the ones working hard to avoid a real debate. In addition, the email quotes were the low-hanging fruit, publicized without hours of the leak/hack. There hasn't been time to properly parse the data. Will more dirt be found? Maybe, maybe not.
While I get where you're coming from, viz. expertise, climate science isn't that esoteric. It's hard, uncertain science, but the results are not complicated. That's why they put up those graphs. Temperature? Going up! Except now we find out by peeking into the sausage factory that it's not that simple, because of a lot of statistical dodges, data massaging and other manipulations. Are they valid? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to tell, since climate scientists don't want to reveal their models because that might impair their ability to get funding. Especially if their models aren't as robust as they want people to believe. While that's not a simple problem, it's got little to do with science and a lot to do with politics. Expertise is not required to smell a rat.