The latest fake news climate story has the winning headline: “Scientists are frantically copying US climate data fearing it might vanish under Trump.”

This is brazen, hilarious and spectacularly misleading. No one has done more damage to “climate data” in the past three decades than the corrupt, politicized activist scientists who are now afraid that they may be neutered or booted out of office by the incoming administration.

One of the many shocking revelations of the 2009 Climategate emails was that in some cases the raw temperature data had been destroyed or lost by the scientists whose job it was to maintain it. Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia admitted that they had not kept “the original raw data” for reasons of “data storage availability”.

That, in turn, prompted a lawsuit by the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, is arguing that U.S. EPA’s climate policies rely on raw data that have been destroyed and are therefore unreliable. The nonprofit group — a staunch critic of U.S. EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases — petitioned (pdf) the agency last week to reopen the public comment period on its proposed “endangerment finding” because the data set had been lost (E&ENews PM, Oct. 9). But climate scientists familiar with the data insist that the reports are based on sound science and that the data in question was altered as part of standard operating procedure to ensure consistency across reporting stations.

For the alarmists now to turn around and claim that the Trump administration is unfit to look after data that they’ve already lost and destroyed is, as Tony Heller puts it, an “Orwellian Climate Moment“:

The same people who have been corrupting temperature data, erasing it, overwriting it, and pushing the biggest scientific scam in history, now say they are trying to protect the data from President Trump. NOAA overwrites their monthly temperature data, and wanted $260,000 to recover data which should have been downloadable online in a matter of seconds Fee Notification Letter – 2014-001602

It is, however, all too typical of the kind of posturing and projection we can expect to see from the climate alarmist establishment as their elaborate Ponzi scheme begins to collapse with the advent of President Donald Trump.

Trump, it is becoming clearer by the day, is in no mood to show any mercy to the cabal of scientists at institutions like NASA GISS and NOAA who have been manipulating raw temperature data — torturing it till it screams — in order to exaggerate the appearance of 20th century warming.

The Washington Post mentions, disapprovingly, a Trump adviser calling for NASA to focus on space exploration and not climate research.

But how can this possibly be a bad thing? The clue is in the name: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA’s dabbling with climate science is bureaucratic overreach. Under Trump it will hopefully return to its core function, with its climate activism at NASA GISS, run by alarmist Gavin Schmidt, swiftly deep-sixed.

Activists are now talking about a purge at the Department of Energy, where Trump’s transition teams have sent out a memo, asking for the names of employees particularly associated with climate change.

It would seem an innocuous request — and shouldn’t the president know who is working on what the left tells us is the highest priority of government, the greatest threat to national security? Apparently not (emphasis added):

Reuters news service examined the memo, which contains 74 questions, including a request for a list of all department employees and contractors who attended the annual global climate talks hosted by the United Nations within the last five years, and a list of the professional affiliations. The missive also requested a list of all department employees or contractors who have attended any meetings on the social cost of carbon, and for a list of all publications written by Energy Department employees over the last three years. The memo also asked for the names of the 20 top salaried employees at the department’s labs, and a list of all websites maintained or contributed to by lab staff during work hours.”

If you are a professional alarmist on the climate change gravy train, this is perhaps very sinister. But it certainly shouldn’t be for the U.S. taxpayer: the Department of Energy should be about energy for the U.S. consumer and economy, and not — as it has become under its green activist staffers — the Department of Suppressing Cheap Energy To Appease The Green Sky Goddess.

The pick of former Texas Governor Rick Perry as the Department’s presumed next head is yet further proof of how serious Trump is in taking on the Green Blob. Like the proposed new head of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt, Perry is no friend of Big Eco. He has one of the best job creation records of any governor in American history.

Meanwhile, if any government employees really are planning to “protect” government data by transferring it onto private servers, they ought to be aware that what they are doing might be a federal crime. Just ask Edward Snowden. Or Hillary Clinton. They know.