“Fiddling temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever,” says Christopher Booker, not pulling his punches. And I think he’s right not to do so. If – as Booker, myself, and few others suspect – the guardians of the world’s land-based temperature records have been adjusting the raw data in order to exaggerate “global warming” then this is indeed a crime against the scientific method unparalleled in history.

Sure you could make a case that Lysenkoism or Hitler’s war to discredit “Jewish science” were more evil but these were confined to discrete geographical regions under specific totalitarian regimes. What’s so extraordinary about the manipulations to the global land-based temperature sets is that they affect every one of us, wherever we live.

Whether you’re an elderly couple in mid-Wales who have just had 20 per cent knocked off the value of your retirement cottage by the new wind farm on the hill opposite, or you’re a tribesman in the South East Asian jungle whose virgin forest home has been trashed to make way for a palm oil plantation to grow eco-friendly biofuels, or you’re a scientist in New Zealand who has been hounded out of your job because your research doesn’t fit the “global warming” narrative, or you’re a science teacher in Ohio who is obliged, whether you like it or not, to lecture your charges on the dread perils of climate change, or you’re a Republican senatorial candidate who has been targeted as a “denier” in a green attack dog campaign financed by Tom Steyer, you’re all victims of the same global scam: a scam perpetrated by a tiny handful of individuals whose junk statistical manipulation of the global climate records have transformed routine weather patterns into the world’s biggest and most influential ever science scare story.

Here, in the letters pages of today’s Telegraph, is yet another example of what I mean. It’s a letter protesting against the devastation of the Scottish landscape by bird-slicing, bat-chomping eco-crucifixes and it’s signed by the director of the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland, the president of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland, the president of the Munro Society, the chairman of National Trust for Scotland, the convener of Ramblers Scotland, and the co-ordinator of Scottish Wild Land.

It begins:

“Few dispute the necessity of reducing our energy use and pursuing renewable energy alternatives to fossil fuels, in order to help address climate change…”

They feel, for understandable reasons, that they are obliged to preface their complaint with the usual obeisance to the Great Green Climate Change Emperor. But what if that Great Green Climate Change Emperor is wearing no clothes?

What then?

Just to recap, here is what we now know about the world’s land-based temperature records. The raw weather station data appears to show in many cases that the 1930s was the warmest decade in the last 100 years (not, as activists like James Hansen have insisted, the period since the late 1990s). Yet this data has now been “adjusted” – so far without any convincing explanation – in order to make the 1930s look cooler than they were and recent periods warmer. The net effect of this has been to make Twentieth century warming look much more dramatic and extreme than it may actually have been – generating concomitant panic among the scientific establishment which has been using this “adjusted” data as the basis for its narrative that we are currently experiencing a dangerous and unprecedented phenomenon sometimes known (though they keep changing the name) as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.

A common defence used by alarmist “experts” to shore up this shaky theory is that lots of different scientific institutions have reached the same conclusion independently of one another.

But here’s the rub: they are not independent. They are all in cahoots because they are all pushing the same narrative, as Booker explains using the example of the “suspicious” one-way adjustments to the weather stations in Paraguay. (And also, it has subsequently been shown, in the Arctic).

First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

This last point is THE point.

If the temperature records on which the entire edifice of the international global warming industry is based are a busted flush then we have all been victims of a scam so vast and all-encompassing it makes Enron look like a model of modesty and integrity. It also raises the question – and I speak here, of course, metaphorically rather than literally: when are heads going to roll?