According to the BBC, one of the world’s leading climate research units has been hacked. The BBC article doesn’t say (as of this writing) what the hacked information has revealed, but a file that allegedly contains the hacked data has appeared on the internet, and, if true, it seems to show a pattern of hiding and/or altering data to fit the theory of global warming.

I have no idea, honestly, whether these e-mails are legitimate or not. I believe they are, but, at this point, I am skeptical. Even assuming they are, this wouldn’t disprove the theory that the earth is warming, or even the theory that said warming is being caused by us. All it would prove is that some scientists deleted, edited, or otherwise falsified data in order to support the theory of global warming. It damages the theory’s credibility, but doesn’t utterly destroy it.

I suspect that these scientists are so confident that their theory is correct that they’re willing to throw out a single set of data that disproves it. Unfortunately for them, we’ve only got one planet, and, therefore, that single set of data is all they have. This isn’t a guy flipping a quarter ten times and having it come up heads all ten times (which would happen about once every 1,024) and then throwing out that particular set of data as an outlier. This is the opposite – a man trying to prove that quarters almost always come up heads and throwing out his first 1,023 experiments simply because they don’t prove his theory.

It probably will take the wind out of the sails of those individuals (See: Al Gore) who’ve made a career out of using the threat of global warming as a selling point for the idea of stripping various freedoms from pretty much anyone who isn’t Al Gore or one of his friends. Unfortunately, though, there are more of these people, who have various other crises (manufactured or otherwise) that they intend to use as an axe to chop away at our freedoms.

I’m anxiously waiting for further developments in this story.