Are the Wheels Finally Going to Come Off the Global Warming Gravy Train?

For the past 24 hours or so I've been following the story of the server hack at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. It seems someone has downloaded about 62 MB worth of data including 1,000+ emails and other documents. What they appear to show is an effort by some of the best known names on the Global Warmenist side of the climate change debate (and no, Al, it isn't "settled") to fudge, if not outright falsify, data that would cast doubt on their findings or not lead to the "right" conclusion.

If all this proves out, the AGW crowd are going to have a much harder time defending their position that massive interventions in and regulation of the World economy are necessary to fend off some putative future climate catastrophe. As we've seen before, this isn't really about The Environment^TM or climate. It's about control. Environmentalism has become the favored vehicle of the statists for imposing ever more control over the economy and intruding further and further into our lives.

There are some good posts on this developing story. Take a look at this and this at Powerline, this by Richard Fernandez and this by the Daily Telegraph's James Delingpole. All of them have lots of further links which should keep you busy for a while.

Update: A summary/chronology of the leaked documents can be found here.