By Michelle Malkin - December 2, 2009

"The science is settled," we've been told for decades by zealous proponents of manmade global warming hysteria. Thanks to an earth-shaking hacking scandal across the pond, we now have mountains of documents from the world's leading global warming advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. You won't be surprised by the Obama administration's response to Climategate.

With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled.

Never mind all the devastating new information about data manipulation, intimidation and cult-like coverups to "hide the decline" in global temperatures over the last half-century, they say. The science is settled.

Never mind what The Atlantic's Clive Crook, after wading through the climate science e-mail files of the U.K.'s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, called the overpowering "stink of intellectual corruption" -- combined with mafia-like suppression of dissent, suppression of evidence and methods, and "plain statistical incompetence" exposed by the document trove. The science is settled.

Never mind the expedient disappearance of mounds of raw weather station data that dissenting scientists were seeking through freedom of information requests from the Climatic Research Unit. The science is settled.

In March, President Obama made a grandiose show of putting "science" above "politics" when lifting the ban on government-funded human embryonic stem cell research. "Promoting science isn't just about providing resources -- it's about protecting free and open inquiry," he said during the signing ceremony. "It's about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient -- especially when it's inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda -- and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."

Yet, the pro-sound science president has surrounded himself with radical Climategate deniers who have spent their entire professional careers "settling" manmade global warming disaster science through fear mongering, intimidation and ridicule of opponents.

-- Science czar John Holdren, who will testify on Capitol Hill this week at a hearing on Climategate, infamously hyped weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich. He made a public bet against free-market economist Julian Simon, predicting dire shortages of five natural resources as a result of feared overconsumption. He lost on all counts. No matter.

Holdren's failure didn't stop him from writing forcefully about mass sterilization and forced abortion "solutions" to a fizzling, sizzling, overpopulated planet. And it didn't stop him from earning a living making more dire predictions.

In 1986, Ehrlich credited Holdren with forecasting that "carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020." He went on to Harvard and the White House. On the "Late Show with David Letterman" earlier this year, Holdren fretted that his son "might not see snow!"

Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist and Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball notes that Holdren turned up in the Climategate files belittling the work of astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division. Holdren put "Harvard" in sneer quotes when mocking a research paper Baliunas and Soon published in 2003 showing that "the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium." First, deny. Next, deride.

-- Energy Secretary Steven Chu picked derision as his weapon earlier this year when peddling the Obama administration's greenhouse-gas emission policy. "The American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act," The Wall Street Journal quoted Chu. He dismissed dissent by asserting that "there's very little debate" about the impact of "green energy" policy on the economy.

There's "very little debate," of course, because dissenters get crushed.

-- The Obama team's chief eco-dissent crusher is climate czar Carol Browner. She oversaw the destruction of Environmental Protection Agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge's order during the Clinton years requiring the agency to preserve its records.

Over the past year, the EPA has stifled the dissent of Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the agency who questioned the administration's reliance on outdated research on the health effects of greenhouse gases. Recently, they sought to yank a YouTube video created by EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams that is critical of cap-and-trade. Browner reportedly threatened auto execs in July by telling them to "put nothing in writing ... ever" about their negotiations with her.

And she is now leading the "science is settled" stonewalling in the wake of Climategate. "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists," she said. "These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real." Book-cookers are good at making it seem so.

In any case, last year, more than 31,000 scientists -- including 9,021 Ph.D.s -- signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.

But hey, who's counting? The science is settled.