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Kate Sheppard reports from the Copenhagen climate conference:

In the early days of the Copenhagen summit….ClimateGate seems to be the main topic of interest for many of the 5,000 journalists here. I’ve been quizzed about it on several television programs, and yesterday I spotted British climate change denier Lord Christopher Monckton dishing on the affair to a gaggle of avid journalists. Scientists and leaders at the summit are being bombarded with questions about the “controversy.”

Ugh.  The first few days of the conference are probably sort of boring, so I suppose it was almost inevitable that ClimateGate would get a lot of attention from bored reporters.  But maybe there’s a bright side to this.  After all, right now Copenhagen is ground zero for real live climate experts who can explain in extensive detail why ClimateGate is a nothingburger on the science front.  So at least it gives journalists a good chance to figure out what it’s really all about.  Plus it’s probably good to let them get this out of their system early so that they’re ready to concentrate on more serious stuff by the time the conference nears its climax.

There’s more on Copenhagen from Kate and David Corn, our reporters on the spot, over at our Blue Marble blog.  Check it out.  In addition to our own blogging, the right-hand column has a real-time feed of Copenhagen reporting from other sources that should keep you up to date on everything that’s going on.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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