When the Climategate e-mails were released last year, the evidence of misconduct by the scientists involved was so strong that the climate establishment was forced to commission a series of tribunals. Yet the conclusions of those inquiries are as specious as the science they were supposed to investigate. By asking the wrong questions — or not asking them at all — they have failed to advance the climate debate one iota.

The Climategate scandal began when an unknown party released thousands of e-mails taken from the servers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (UEA and CRU). The e-mails appeared to show the world’s leading paleoclimatologists manipulating data to mislead, interfering with the peer review process and conspiring to delete e-mails in order to avoid freedom of information requirements.