What little credibility the promoters of global warming hysteria had remaining has now been shredded. From Investor's Business Daily (emphasis added):

We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.

In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.

As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."

Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.

E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D'Aleo, said he found "patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations." The more he looked, the more he found "patterns of deletion that could not be accidental."

…

Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.

I wonder — if we graphed the amount of scientific fraud uncovered in the field of climatology over the past few decades, would it look like a hockey stick?

A quick update from Instapundit (for the benefit of my legions of readers who aren't familiar with that obscure Tennessee blogger):

OOPS: Former NASA climate scientist pleads guilty to contract fraud. “A former top climate scientist who had become one of the scientific world’s most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth’s atmosphere was sentenced to probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to steering lucrative no-bid contracts to his wife’s company.”

Related, from the ClimateGate emails: “We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn’t make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.”

'Nuff said. These "scientists" promoting AGW are both charlatans and crooks. They're not just fraudulently promoting their ideological agenda, they're also enriching themselves in the process. 

But by all means, check out Instapundit's links. Especially the second one's quoted notes from Ian "Harry" Harris. And check out the the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, apparently from the same person. And those of you familiar with the FORTRAN and/or IDL programming languages might be interested in this post and its links (thanks, David B.).

Given that, according to Shakespeare, "the better part of valor is discretion," maybe the world's leaders should just cancel the Copenhagen climate summit. After all, its entire agenda is premised on now-discredited conclusions created by sloppy and unscientific computer models using raw data that was deliberately massaged to hide the truth and then destroyed.

And maybe someone should tell John Travolta, Sheryl Crow, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Oprah Winfrey, Trudie Styler (wife of Sting), and other strident advocates of making the rest of us lower our carbon emissions, not to fly their private jets to Copenhagen.

David Aitken (who really should be posting this stuff at his blog instead of just emailing his friends) called it, "Not just the smoking gun, but the bullet." The UK TimesOnline reported that "the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures" destroyed the raw data it used to arrive at its conclusions in support of anthropogenic global warming (AGW):

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

… Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Well, that explains why they've refused to reveal their raw data and stonewalled all previous requests. One of the core principles of the scientific method is transparency — you share with others exactly how you arrived at your conclusion so that they can replicate your results or disprove them. The proponents of the AGW theory have fought such openness every step of the way, as if they had something to hide. It's reasonable to conclude that they do. Indeed, it would be foolish and naive to assume that they do not.

Some recent comments on the TimesOnline post put things in perspective nicely: 

Joe Horner wrote:

"Dear Inland Revenue, I enclose my latest accounts. Please note that I accidentally destroyed all the original invoices but I promise they were all entered correctly. Honest"

Truely unbelievable!

 

Whitbread Tankard wrote:

One of them said in the leaked emails that he'd rather delete the raw data than release it, maybe he did just that!

 

Truth Orator, yes one could theoretically back out the corrections but that in turn implies trust in those values being archived correctly. What we've seen so far is a rather chaotic organisation when it comes to documentation etc.

The whole thing is an utter disgrace and a blot on British scientific work.

 

Whitbread Tankard wrote:
One of them said in the leaked emails that he'd rather delete the raw data than release it, maybe he did just that!

 

David Aitken wrote:

Reversing the alterations is probably impossible because the alterations were probably done by 1 or more complex algorithms that may no longer exist. It's not just a matter of adding or subtracting a simple number.