For years there has been a strong divide between those that believe mankind is causing global warming and those that don't.

Now there is evidence that leading global warming scientists have been misleading the world for years, hiding - and possibility erasing - data that provides the earth has been cooling for the last 10 years.

Background

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Founded in 1972, the CRU has been one of the leading institutions studying the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change (i.e. caused or produced by humans).

The small group of scientists who work with the CRU have been the most influential group driving the worldwide alarm over global warming. The CRU has reported the average temperature of the globe has been rising for the last 150 years. The have predicted that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it. Their work is at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What recently happened

The CRU collects climate data from sources around the world, but has never shared the raw data with the public.

Over the last year, the CRU has received numerous Freedom of Information requests for the raw data that all of the CRU's science and dire warnings were based upon. No raw data has been released.

This month, hackers broke into a server at the CRU and stole a large quantity of data, including more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents, dated from March 1996 to November 2009.

The stolen emails, now public, document how the scientists kept contrary views out of peer-review literature, and worse yet, conspired to manipulate data to strengthen the evidence for anthropogenic climate change.

The University of East Anglia has confirmed the server's security breach. Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the CRU, has now confirmed that all of the leaked emails appear to be genuine.

What did the emails say?

In the emails, Dr. Jones mentions he was willing to delete the climate data file rather than sending it to a pair of skeptics that were interested in reviewing the research.

Here are some excerpts that were put together by the National Post:

From Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes, three U.S. scientists who have produced the controversial “hockey-stick graphs” that purport to show rapidly increasing temperatures in recent decades. Nov, 16, 1999.

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

From Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to Michael Mann, on Oct 12. 2009. The email, titled “BBC U-turn on climate,” laments a BBC article that reversed its long-held position on man-made global warming.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. ... Our observing system is inadequate.”

From: Michael Mann, Oct 27, 2009

“Perhaps we’ll do a simple update to the Yamal post... As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.”

From: Edward Cook, June 4, 2003

“I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. ... If published as is, this paper could really do some damage … It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically (...) I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review — Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting.”

From: Tom Wigley, Sep 27, 2009

“So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 C, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these).”

From: Phil Jones, Feb 2, 2005

“The two MMs [Canadian skeptics Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

From: Phil Jones, May 29, 2008

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

From: Keith Briffa, Sep 22, 1999

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming.”

From: Michael E. Mann, Mar 11, 2003

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

From: Tom Wigley, Apr24, 2003

“Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc.”

From: Phil Jones, July 5, 2005

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”

Read all of the e-mails:
Alleged CRU Emails - Searchable

The files that were leaked also include the Fortran code the CRU's climate models are based upon. Now that this code is public, people worldwide are pulling the code apart and coming to the same conclusion - the computer models themselves appear to be jerry-rigged and deeply flawed.

Why would the scientists and the CRU lie?

Why would Dr. Jones want to convince the world that global warming is real? Only Dr. Jones knows the answer. Was it a case of believing something so much he was willing to manipute data to support an idea? Some believe the answer is in the $22.6 million Dr. Jones has collected in research grants since 1990.

What now?

The CRU has now said they will release any data they have, but that most of the original data was deleted in the 1980's. Due to a lack of data storage availability, the CRU opted to save only “value-added” data, that is, numbers that have been manipulated. If this is true, and no original climate raw data exists, it is now impossible for anyone to replicate the findings of the CRU.

If all anthropogenic global warming theories are based on data and models that are now proven to be worthless, or non-existent, what does that mean now?

Does it mean we don't have to fear the dire warnings that the polar ice caps are melting? That the polar bears will soon be extinct? What about carbon credits?

Media coverage

Now being dubbed "Climategate", editorials in newspapers around the world are questioning why politicians and the UN have yet to acknowledge the damning evidence that man-made climate change science is bunk.

Lorrie Goldstein, of the Toronto Sun, wrote:

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have.

What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Read more: Why 'climategate' won't stop greens" (Toronto Sun)

Most of the outcry about ClimateGate is appearing in editorials, blog posts, and alternative news websites, most of the mainstream media has completely ignored this story despite the growing public outcry.

Instead, the focus of the mainstream media is on the upcoming 2009 UN Climate Change Conference is scheduled for December 7th - 18th in Copenhagen.

Read the e-mails:
Alleged CRU Emails - Searchable

Read more:
EDITORIAL: Hiding evidence of global cooling (Washington Times)
Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation (Telegraph.co.uk)
Leaked e-mails suggest climate experts rigged data (The Detroit News)
Why 'climategate' won't stop greens (Toronto Sun)
Climategate (National Post)
Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts? - Dr. Tim Ball, Canadian Climatologist, 2007
Climategate denial foundering on army of Davids (Washington Examiner)
Britain's Climate Research Unit to release data in wake of Climategate (Examiner)
Response from the CRU (University of East Anglia)