CLIMATEGATE Written by Jack Kelly    Tuesday, 24 November 2009 It's being called Climategate - the "death knell" of climate change hysteria, and of "cap and trade" legislation.  A number of the world's top scientists advocating man-made global warming may go to jail for criminal fraud - and Al Gore may never be invited to another late night talk show again. During an appearance on NBC's Tonight show Nov. 12, former Vice President Al Gore told host Conan O'Brien geothermal energy is a promising alternative to fossil fuels because "the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot." The temperature at the earth's core has been estimated at between 4,000 and 6,000 degrees Celsius.  As John Derbyshire of National Review noted, "if the temperature anywhere inside the earth were ‘several million degrees,' we'd be a star." The earth's continental crust varies from 20 to 30 miles thick (the crust underneath the oceans is much thinner, 3-6 miles thick), and gets warmer by about 50 degrees Fahrenheit for every kilometer you go down - so you'd have to drill through tens of thousands of feet to get to a few hundred degrees. Errors of this sort makes one suspect the professor who gave young Al a "D" grade in Natural Sciences 6 ("Man's Place in Nature") as a sophomore at Harvard was being kind. Yet liberals, particularly those in journalism, regard this boob as an authority on earth science.  In a cover story Nov. 9, Newsweek called him "the thinking man's thinking man." On Friday (11/20), Mr. Gore's signature cause, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), suffered a mortal blow... if Climategate is reported fully. The Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain is one of four places in the world where global temperature data sets are compiled.  Someone (apparently an insider) hacked into the CRU's computer system, and on Friday posted online 1,079 emails and 72 documents.  Dr. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, has said the emails appear to be genuine. (The total amount of CRU data "hacked" is huge - 61 megabytes.  You can download it here or here.) Dr. Jones and his global warming alarmist colleagues have a fundamental problem:  The planet hasn't warmed since 1998, and -- according to satellite measurements -- has cooled significantly in the last two years.  The emails indicate how they dealt with it. Blogger Ed Morrissey (Hot Air) summarizes: ·        Prominent environmental scientists organize a boycott of scientific journals if those journals publish scholarly material from global warming dissidents. ·        The scientists then orchestrate attacks on the dissidents because of their lack of scholarly material published in scientific journals. ·        The scientists block from the UN's report on global warming evidence that is harmful to the anthropogenic global warming consensus. ·        The scientists, when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request for their correspondence and data, delete the correspondence and data lest it be used against them. ·        The scientists fabricate data when their data fails to prove the earth is warming. The heart of the scientific method is falsifiability.  Scientists share data with each other to see whether or not their experiments can be replicated.  By massaging data to meet a preconceived conclusion, and by hiding data from skeptical colleagues, Dr. Jones and his associates were acting more like criminal scam artists.  For instance, in an email Nov. 16, 1999, Dr. Jones told three other scientists: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps for each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."  ("Mike" is Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University, author of the "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures which Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKittrick demonstrated to be fraudulent.  "Keith" is Dr. Keith Briffa of the CRU, whose temperature graphs from tree ring data from Yamal, Russia, also have been shown by McIntyre and McKittrick to be unreliable.) "Where the heck is global warming?" asked Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, of Prof. Mann Oct. 12.  "We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the last two days for the coldest days on record...The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." There's much more in the emails, but you won't read them in the New York Times.  Andrew Revkin, who writes the Times' environmental section, said Friday "the documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here." The Times has not hesitated to publish classified information illegally leaded about U.S. intelligence programs.  But for Mr. Revkin and others in the news media, protecting global warming hoaxsters from scrutiny is more important than U.S. national security. Climategate ought to be the death knell not only of the fraud of global warming, but the fraud of "mainstream" liberal journalism as well. Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.