16.7°C Sunny 
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Oh-oh. Just as the Copenhagen Climate Conference gets underway, all the world’s fertilizer hits all the world’s ventilators.
We refer, of course, to the fact that hackers have accessed 1,000 emails and 2,000 other documents from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the prestigious University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.
The emails seem to indicate an alarming effort to mislead governments and the public in favour of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.
The potentially disgraced scientists are accused of several breaches of public and governmental trust, including hiding significant information that ran counter to their manmade-global-warming cause.
They are also accused of manipulating data to achieve the results they wanted, and of suggesting ways to stonewall unsupportive individuals who would debate their findings.
Without listing all their transgressions, we take special note of the actions of the IPCC director Dr. Philip Jones, who, it appears, deleted from hard drives a great deal of data he didn’t want found by the wrong people.
The deletions were, ostensibly, by accident, but it only amounted to about five per cent of the all the damaging evidence anyway, which gives us an idea for a bumper sticker: So much disagreeable data to delete, so little time.
We can’t but wonder what effect all this will have. If — and we do say if — the whole sordid mess is indeed fact, that climate change scientists doctored or deleted data and having been deceiving us all along for the sake of government grants, profitable publications, the lecture circuit, etc., then what’s to happen to the global-warming-crisis industry?
Hello, Elizabeth May. In response to this yet-to-be-sorted-out mess, the national Green Party leader tries to redirect attention to the conspirators who “hacked into the computers in the first place.” They, she implies, are the bad guys. Further, after claiming to have read all the hacked emails, she says, “They never once suggest cooking the books or fudging the science.”
Yet some of the emails quoted show otherwise and it was serious enough that director Jones was forced to step down.
Says May: “Dr. Phil Jones, who headed up the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, has just stepped aside during the investigation. My money is on a full exoneration for him.”
It’s too soon to know exactly what’s going on and who the bad guys are in this quasi-conspiracy. All of this, of course, doesn’t mean we aren’t faced with immense challenges based on global warming, and certainly not that climate change isn’t real.
About the only thing we can control when it comes to Mother Nature is our own behaviour. What’s disturbing is that if we aren’t the cause of climate change, it means we won’t be able to do a thing about it.
