Tony Kane wrote of the recent email hack aimed at Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia. In today’s Huntsville Examiner, his article “ClimateGate emails provide unwanted scrutiny of climate scientists” describes the professional practices rampant among the Western World’s scientific elite.

On the surface, the emails seem to indicate scientists modified data to fit the anthropogenic global warming theory, tried to silence dissenting opinions and reflect a concerted effort to restrict access to climate data possibly by deleting it.

So other than that, we can all just relax and trust the gubbermint. This bill of particulars is damning if true. Kane cites specific emails describing or demanding unethical practices. Climate Research Unit Director, Dr. Phil Jones, appears particularly mendacious and culpable. Here, Dr. Jones discusses ways to thwart FOIA requests concerning the center’s academic research data.

“I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” Jones apparently considered ways to stymie or limit FOIA requests by “removing station data” and “omit some other countries” because “it would annoy them [those requesting the data].”

This procedure is used when Dr. Jones is forced to acknowledge that the data exists at all. Otherwise; he executes The Fawn Hall option, and makes inconvenient data vanish from existence. Here he describes what correspondence he’d like to see flushed down the Orwellian Memory Hole.

“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.”

Inconvenient data, stuff that’s not truthy enough, that just gets left out of Climate Research Unit presentations. Scientist Mick Kelly describes how data sufficiency is currently defined in the Geophysics research community.

One scientist, Mick Kelly, discussed giving a presentation and rather than include the cooling he said, “I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.”

When journals printed articles that Dr. Michael Mann didn’t like, the climate cabal then colluded to have them discredited as valid sources of scientific knowledge. Dr. Mann describes his concern about some published material in the American Geophysics Union Research Letters.

Mann seemed particularly concerned about a ‘contrarian’ with the name Saiers, presumably James Saiers of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “Apparently, the contrarians now have an “in” with GRL. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/ the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences [where Saiers completed his PhD] that causes me some unease,” Mann wrote.

Always open-minded and relentless to hear every point of view; Dr. Tom Wigley knew how to adjust Dr Saiers’ attitude. Nothing quite educates the rest of us like a good example. Wigley described how he intended to make Dr. Saiers into one below.

“If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”

The data got edited, the data got deliberately misreported, and when “necessary,” it even got destroyed. Journals that published dissenters got threatened with interdict. The dissenters, themselves, got black-balled from the scientific community. This would be tantamount to professional ruin in their chosen avocations.

In a similar scientific environment, soon after the Medieval Warm Period, Galileo and Copernicus managed top-notch work. Yet few others even tried to publish their work. Human knowledge lagged behind societal needs and life was quite often what Hobbes would describe as “nasty, brutish and short.” This typically happens to cultures where scientific inquiry is forcibly muted or curtailed.

Behavior synonymous to that of the Climate Research Unit could usher in a new dark age. One where the words still get published, but only after censorious auditors denude them of verity and applicable wisdom. This new age would publish plenty of science, but would strive to educate and improve the lives of nobody.

The Journals would go unread. The authors would truly care less. The awards would go unearned, but always, like the now-laughable Nobel Peace Prize, be copiously awarded. Many would work as “scientists.” None would dare to disprove the null hypothesis. We would “understand” everything: or else, but it would avail us nothing of value or use.

Scientific knowledge, like genuine religious faith, is one of the few marked differences between civilized man and the apes that first climbed down from the trees and walked upright. It sets us apart, helps define our existence and drives us ever forward towards better life and a more decent society.

At least it does these things until it is censored. When the progression of learning is thwarted by fear, greed or mendaciousness, the societal base of knowledge can only crumble and rot. As the genius is lost, the innovation goes away. One less trait differentiates our society from the hidebound oligarchy imagined in the Planet of The Apes movies.

In these purloined emails, we see the cynical corruption and meretricious evil that these jackals have perpetrated at The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. A key motor that drives our progress and growth as human beings has been stilled to satisfy the transitory greed of a political elite. Rome eventually fell because of similar self-delusion. If our society is to survive, scientific inquiry must be retaken from the iniquitous emailers, revealed as malefactors by the Great Email hack of 2009.