The emails and documents leaked last week from some of the world's leading climatologists offer a rich trove of evidence that scientists were massaging the data and corrupting the scientific process to support their own preconceptions. But they also offer the beginnings of an explanation for why. In the words of another famous leaker, follow the money.

On its Web site, the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit describes how it could barely make ends meet for most of the years since it was founded in 1972, and how...