In recent months, the latest scandal named after Richard Nixon's notorious break-in and cover-up, Watergate, has been making waves in the news.
While it received little play in the American press — save for The Drudge Report — European media and the British government have been up in arms.
Climategate, as it is called, began when leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia in Britain between members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested data was being hidden or taken out of reports released in 2007, and that some of their allegations about the effects of global warming were either false or overstated.
Also in the middle of the storm is Professor Phil Jones, who was involved in many of the e-mails and let his quotes from an interview with the BBC in mid-February be taken out of context and used by global warming skeptics against him.
The e-mails are a series of dry exchanges about scientific data scattered with short comments degrading skeptics.
This "us against them" mentality weakened their argument and led to the repeal of some of the changes necessary to stop global warming.
The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) community needs to change or, in the end, will be to blame for the very catastrophes it is trying to stop.
Within the e-mails are examples of members from the IPCC suggesting ways to hide information from peer review and to manipulate data to make it conform to their beliefs in AGW.
Many of the quotes can be found easily enough online, and, even if taken out of context, are extremely damaging in the eyes of a skeptic or anyone with a partially independent view on the matter of climate change.
While the e-mails are bad, the alleged deliberate misconstruing of facts to incite fear in the public may be the researchers' biggest crime.
Threats that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, that the number of hurricanes would increase, that South American rainforests would die and that an African famine would leave millions starving have all been revealed as false, too disputable to be published, or exaggerated.
Together, we have a group of highly influential scientists appearing to fudge numbers while looking to prove a specific result instead of analyzing data objectively.
They might have also have been trying to incite fear in the public by overstating a threat, which is especially interesting considering that in the political spectrum, the side deeply entrenched in AGW also criticized the Bush administration for doing the same thing when pushing for anti-terrorism legislation.
However, all of this does not mean man-made global warming is a lie.
It is very likely that the unnatural levels of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere are damaging the environment.
Yet even with all the graphs, reports and undeniable evidence, only 34 percent of the country believes in AGW.
Fifty percent say the increase of temperature is part of the Earth's natural cycle of warming and cooling.
Both figures are according to a Rasmussen survey on Dec. 17, 2009.
The global warming message is not getting across.
For all their doomsday predictions, if the risk of climate change is so important to the future of mankind why put themselves in position to be questioned about anything other than the data?
Instead of debating if the warming is being caused by man and how to properly fix it, we are talking about leaked e-mails and fear mongering.
If AGW is true, which is not the debate here, then Arizona recently dropping out of the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative pact to reduce greenhouse gasses by 2012, is the last thing the world needs.
Just last week South Dakota passed Resolution 1009, which says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, killing any idea of future cap and trade in the state.
The already difficult task of convincing the rest of the world to adopt expensive changes to their industry and economy just became even harder than before.
After a long silence on the matter, AGW spokesman Al Gore finally responded last Sunday with an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
In what ended up being nothing more than a condescending reassertion of everything he has already said, he blamed corporations and oil companies for stealing the e-mails, and called 50 percent of the American people "deniers" and the problem.
With the same negative tone as the e-mails that forced him to come out with the article in the first place, he did nothing to gain support, apologize for mistakes or lay out a plan to regain public trust.
Al Gore, best intentions or not, is a polarizing figure stemming back to the 2000 presidential election that is to blame for much of the current partisan divide in American politics.
Additionally, his millions of dollars of investments in green technology are only profitable if AGW is true, so in a sense he is banking on man-made global warming.
Because of this he leaves himself open to allegations of corruption, and his reputation as a politician means all of his preaching for change will only be heard by his own deeply entrenched choir.
If saving the world truly is at stake, then the AGW community needs to make some drastic changes themselves.
Gore should step aside; his presence in the issue only divides the country.
It is like Republicans believing Sarah Palin as a spokeswoman against abortion might draw more support from the left.
It will not work for them; it will not work for Gore.
Also, the IPCC needs to be dissolved and replaced with scientists proven to be objective and without so much as the smell of being connected to investment groups related to green technology.
The integrity of the IPCC is damaged too much to believe it can continue with only new leadership.
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