Needless to say, the Drive-Bys won’t ever touch this story, even with a ten foot pole, lest the truth emerge that the skeptics - yours truly among their number - were correct after all: global warming hysteria is precisely that and it’s predicated on a lime Jell-O foundation of junk science, bogus data and lots of lies, both big and small.

A couple of days ago word began circulating on the Internet that the Hadley Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in England was the victim of a hacker who got into the computer system and downloaded both e-mails and documents that lend credence to the skeptics’ claims.

On his blog at the U.K. Telegraph, James Delingpole summarizes the scandal neatly and concisely. Here is his post in its entirety:

When you read some of those files — including 1079 emails and 72 documents — you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science.” [...]

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because — though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room — he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September — I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” — Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which — in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community — spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC. . . .

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true, it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

I’m inclined to believe the veracity of these e-mails partly because the details are just too complex for someone to fabricate out of whole cloth but mostly because, as a piece that completes the puzzle, it fits perfectly - given what we know so far about both the climate and the people researching it.

In effect, these warmists have been asking us for the past decade - certainly since last winter - “Who do you believe…us or you’re shivering body and chattering teeth?” and the Hadley Scandal serves to confirm what we already knew intuitively. Judge Judy is fond of saying, “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining” and in this case I suppose we might say, “Don’t dump snow on the World Series in October and tell me the globe is warming.”

It will be very interesting to see how this little drama plays out. Phil Jones admitted the system had been hacked and data retrieved; now that the scandal has spilled over into public arena I suppose it will be just a matter of time before the hacked data is analyzed in comparison with the data in the Hadley system to verify its authenticity. Jones would be a fool at this point to attempt destroying any more data - he may very well face criminal charges as it is in light of the fact that, over the past two decades, he has secured over $25 million in grant funding from the British government. Fraud on a scale this massive is not looked upon kindly in the U.K.

How will this affect Pope Albert the Pompous? Good question. I suspect that from the moment the story broke on Friday, his minions have been hard at work on talking points and press releases that ensure His Holiness is not in any way tainted by the inkjet splatter that will doubtless occur if and when the story gets any significant media exposure in the U.S.

Much as I hate to say this, it’s really up to FOX News to make or break this story - the alphabet broadcast and cable networks will studiously ignore it. Unfortunately, Hannity and Beck have their hands full with health care debate. (O’Reilly is a self-fellating, blowhard ratings whore who chases only those stories that will garner higher Nielsons.)

Assuming the Senate bill passes (at this point it’s still a dicey proposition) and the nation is saddled with a nationalized health care system, we can expect Congressional Democrats to turn their beady little eyes in the direction of Cap & Trade.

By that time, hopefully, more light will be shed on the Hadley Scandal and the veracity of the hacked data will be confirmed or rejected. If confirmed, I suspect that either Hannity or Beck will pick up the baton and lead the attack, at which point the Drive-Bys will have no choice but to acknowledge what’s been taking place at the Hadley CRU over the past decade.

The hacked data, coupled with the effects of what will likely be the worst winter in recent memory, may very well be the tipping point that ensures the defeat of the Cap & Trade bill and the beginning of the downfall of Pope Albert the Pompous.

Let us pray.