Using a "nature trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures is anything but objective and honest science.

But those are some of the expressions most remembered from the first batch of hacked emails revealing the alleged scheming of a climate research team at East Anglia University in 2009.

The release of these emails has become known as Climategate, an analogy with the Watergate scandal that forced U.S. president Richard Nixon to resign from office in 1974. And although it is becoming more and more common to add the suffix, "-gate", to an event in order to scandalize it untested, it appears Climategate was aptly named.

"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 (in global temperatures)," wrote CRU director of research Phil Jones to other leading government-funded climate researchers in one of the hacked emails. Emails like this appear to show the climatologists talking about manipulating data so that it better fits the global warming doomsday scenario that has been popularized by the likes of Al Gore, David Suzuki, and even former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell, who brought in some of the most aggressive climate legislation in the world, resulting in an unpopular consumer tax on fuel, the carbon tax, and highly questionable carbon trading schemes, like the province's Pacific Carbon Trust.

In 2010, School District 58 here in the Nicola Valley paid out $27,277 from the taxpayers' pockets to the Pacific Carbon Trust as a means to reduce their alleged "carbon footprint." The district received about $20,000 in rebates from this.
Cash-strapped school districts across the province also had to pay, under the Climate Action plan, more than $4 million to PCT that year. What's more, these tax dollars are used by PCT to pay corporations, like Encana, in order to cut their "greenhouse gas emissions."

The carbon tax is just the beginning of what could be a long line of taxes, all based on the controversial research put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the accused at the center of Climategate. Where we go from here, the taxpayer doesn't know, because all-too-willing governments won't dare question the research.

Some ranchers in the Nicola Valley have opposed the carbon tax since its introduction three years ago, calling it unfair and unproductive for their struggling industries.

Meanwhile, Jones, and others, deny the accusations of climate research malfeasance and say the Climategate emails were taken out of context. The seemingly damning terminology used in the emails means something else (innocent) in the climate research community, they claim.

A plausible defence. Perhaps warmists are correct that an over-zealous group of big oil beneficiaries jumped the gun with the emails and distorted their meaning. Either way, there needs to be an extensive investigation of the emails, the climate researchers involved, and their methods used to obtain and project climate data, especially given that this same cadre of researchers conveniently omitted the medieval warming period from the warmists' widely used hockey stick graph, Michael E. Mann's reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last 600 to 1,000 years, which show alarming warming trends.

But then something else happened.

Last month, a new batch of emails was released, this time unearthing more dirt on the Climate Research Unit, the United Nation's climate panel, and the IPCC. Dubbed Climategate 2.0, the over 5,000 emails appear to show scientists ditching the lab for the streets to engage in global warming activism, more suppression of contradictory climate data, collusion with governments—even bankers like Goldman Sachs, and the sabotaging of the careers of skeptical scientists.

"I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts," again writes Jones in a Climategate 2 email. "One way to cover yourself and all those working on AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get—and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Department of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data."

With such a lack of consensus among scientists over the cause and severity of climate change, one wonders if Campbell and his Liberals rushed to declare a state of emergency with the climate when it initiated its aggressive Climate Action Plan to combat the carbon bogeyman. It appears so, especially with the revelations from the embarrassing Climategate emails.

"What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably…," said a researcher in another email.

A moratorium on global warming initiatives in this province is in order until the science is better established and the taxpayers get the full story on climate research, which is anything but settled and anything but transparent.

—John O'Connor