Even before Climategate, a lot of people were skeptical about global warming. The most fanatical cultists like Al Gore and Laurie David insisted we conserve energy and drive fuel efficient cars, all while they fly around the country in private jets and live in mansions using more energy in a day than most of us do in a year. It was hard to take a movement seriously when the leaders of that movement didn’t even do what they said needed to be done in order to save the planet. It was common sense to most of us that the Earth gets cooler and then warmer in cycles. But, we had to endure years and years of global warming hysteria, which ultimately led to the “green” movement which is still persisting today, even as less and less people believe in global warming. Almost everything we’ve been told about global warming has turned out to be false. Oceans are actually cooling, not warming. The ice caps did get smaller… and then grew again. The largest contributor to global warming was cows farting, not soccer moms driving SUVs. Then Climategate happened. A global warming advocacy group, Real Climate, was hacked and hundreds upon hundreds of e-mails stolen. Those e-mails confirmed that scientists had been manipulating data to fit their global warming theory and ignoring the data that disproved it.

Well, Climategate just took another interesting turn. It turns out that it doesn’t stop just at some hacked e-mails. Professor Phil Jones, the former director of Climatic Research Unit, allegedly went further than just trying to hide the truth in some e-mails — and the UN might be involved, too.

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

… Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN’s embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

… The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.

More and more information is coming out that makes global warming look like a hoax, a scare invented by a select group of scientists who engineered the data to make it fit what they wanted it to be. And even if none of this explicitly disproves global warming, it certainly casts a large shadow of doubt over it. If this is the kind of work that leading global warming scientists are doing, how can we trust it? How can we trust them? The answer is, of course, that we can’t. When there are accusations of scientific fraud floating around, then clearly there isn’t solid, reliable scientific work being done. If the science itself is shoddy, then it’s even harder to believe that the science they say is real is actually true. It’s looking more and more like they just wanted global warming to be real, and wanted it so badly that they lied and manipulated data and hid information.

Sadly, even if these scientists had the best of intentions the outcome could have been — and really, still could be — disastrous. Most global warming fanatics are out to use the cause for their own personal gains. Al Gore, for example, is poised and ready to make millions, some of which he’s already making with his film and his carbon credit company. The government is already using global warming as an excuse for even more intrusion into our lives, with cap and trade, for example. The global warming scam could have a horrible effect on us. The sad thing is that the science here is far from settled, and it’s looking more and more like a group of men basically made it all up.

Unfortunately, it could still have very real repercussions. The Guardian, for example, is doing its own investigation of Professor Jones and sees for themselves that the science is shaky at best. But they still just don’t want to let global warming go.

Cross-posted from Cassy’s blog. Stop by for more original commentary, or follow her on Twitter!