ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The latest release of 5,000 emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) reconfirms what the 2009’s “Climategate” files established: Global warming is more fiction than science.

The basic problem with climate research is that it is at best soft science, and this leaked correspondence demonstrate just how unsettled it is. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others,” one scientist wrote. “This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.” Nonsense, another concluded: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.” But what if the whole warming phenomenon is “mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?” one scientists muses. “They’ll kill us probably.”

The fact that different climate studies reach widely different conclusions is not surprising. Much of the global warming debate centers on the output of highly questionable computer models that conjure figures from scarcely understood variables, dubious raw data and gaping holes filled with assumptions that usually confirm the researchers’ biases. No wonder that even as reliable temperature measurements show global temperatures have flatlined or been falling for the past decade, claims of imminent catastrophe have grown more shrill. Garbage in, warming out.

None of this would matter outside the halls of academia except that this field’s activists have spent years lobbying governments to reorganize whole economies based on the sketchy results of their highly debatable models. “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group,” one scientist wrote, noting in another email that “the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” Those who disagreed with the warmist agenda were systematically excluded from high-level documents like the now-discredited 2007 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This and other “evidence” have been seized by popularizers like former Vice President Al Gore to foist distorted doomsday scenarios on innocent schoolchildren, panicky liberals and other credulous people.

Warmists dismiss the leaked emails or complain they have been taken out of context. Not so. Collectively, the emails provide evidence of various crimes against the scientific method, such as concealed or destroyed source data, selective measurement, predetermined conclusions, hidden funding sources and bowing to government influence. They knew they were doing wrong and sought to hide the evidence. “One way to cover yourself,” wrote professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU, “would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember to do it.” Fortunately for science, Mr. Jones was, for once, correct.

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