What are these ^M's that keep showing up in my files in emacs?

In git-config, set core.autocrlf to true to make git automatically convert line endings correctly for your platform, e.g. run this command for a global setting:

git config --global core.autocrlf true

Someone is not converting their line-ending characters correctly.

I assume it's the Windows folk as they love their CRLF. Unix loves LF and Mac loved CR until it was shown the Unix way.

^M is 0x0d, i.e. the carriage return character. If your display looks like

line 1^M
line 2^M

then the file must have come from Windows because the standard newline sequence on Windows is CR LF (0x0d 0x0a) whereas the standard newline sequence consists solely of LF on Unices.

If the file had come from a Mac OS 9 or earlier system, you would see it as

line 1^Mline 2^M

because there would be no line feeds following the carriage returns.