Chris Horner: Climate-gate e-mails released by whistleblower, not hacker

After reams of information were posted on a Russian server detailing the inner workings at the highest -- and highest-compensated -- levels of what's called "climate science," many of us in the "skeptic" community were reminded of one phrase: "Told you so."

The information included e-mails, computer codes, annotations to code and the like. They were all of a part, not rife with "How's the wife?"-type correspondence but apparently the documents responding to a long-frustrated series of requests under the United Kingdom's freedom of information law.

This is only one of numerous factors indicating that the disclosures were not the work of a "hacker," as the media parrot without evidence, but a whistleblower on the inside.

The e-mails detail organized efforts to subvert and violate transparency laws -- as well, it would seem, as document retention, ethics and other policies --- in order to keep the public misinformed about the state of climate science, upon which trillion-dollar policy decisions and critical issues of energy sovereignty and security lie. One year ago I released my book "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed." I named the star players in the revealed e-mails and detailed precisely the very acts these scientists acknowledge.

None of these gentlemen challenged what I wrote then. Now, however, I suggest all have likely retained counsel with defensive purposes in mind.

That is because e-mails and annotations to computer code affirm what for years we have warned policymakers of because of the very dense smoke coming from this fire. That is falsification of results, an organized campaign to subvert laws and, on the face of many statements, an intent to defraud.

The implicated scientists insist it is unreasonable to read the plain meaning of their statements, and instead we must believe a series of implausible interpretations. One smoking gun is the striking phrase "trick to hide the decline" in temperatures which, we're told, really was nothing more than poor word choice, "in the heat of the moment" which happened to last over years of correspondence.

Possibly we should entertain such fantasy, except that the authors also affirm the trick as just that in a dozen places in the annotated code. Oh, and an independent assessment of the very actions in question already had shown them to be, well, a trick to hide the decline in temperatures (as in the "Wegman Report" commissioned by Congress).

The scientists insist that there's no there there, and that their work and reputations have been wrongly sullied. Surely they would join our call for an investigation, if only to clear their names and put us nagging "skeptics" away for good. Then again, probably not.

We need an investigation, though not out of concern for the offenders' reputations. In the meantime, we must stay any further Kyoto-style commitments, cap-and-trade regulation and the Environmental Protection Agency's threat to impose the latter through the back door.

Instead, on Wednesday the Obama administration apparently panicked at these disclosures, quickly abandoned its position on a successor to the Kyoto treaty and vowed to politically commit the United States to deep carbon dioxide emission cuts in three weeks' time.

All along the Obama administration insisted that it wouldn't do it without congressional instruction in the form of domestic legislation, now stalled in the Senate because among the many jobs it would kill are those of lawmakers voting to impose a climatically meaningless biggest tax increase in American history.

As such, by going to Copenhagen to save Kyoto, President Obama will kill it. Knowing full well that an investigation must surely follow, given the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars already squandered on questionable science, he has doubled down on the utilitarian green mantra "we must act now!"

Delay would be fatal. But so will haste. Scientists lied, Kyoto died. Hallelujah.

Chris Horner is a senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed."