All is pervaded with the smell of turpentine

The news wires are alive this week with a shocking story of deceit, misinformation and deliberate falsification of data in the ongoing debate about climate change.

In an interesting coincidence with the upcoming summit in Copenhagen some e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia have been 'leaked' and a press story generated around their contents. The e-mails selected out for publication centre around a cover-page graph of mean temperatures derived from data from tree surveys. The depiction of the data from the period 1960 onwards was apparently adjusted to account for an anomaly wherein the mean temperature appears to fall from that year onwards. The fall in temperature didn't actually happen according to other temperature data and is a statistical anomaly related to how the tree data was collected. The adjustment produced a graph depicting a continuing rise, reflecting the actual temperature data more accurately and removing the need for an explanatory paragraph on the front cover.

Climate scientists should know better than to make adjustments to such a politically sensitive set of data, however mediocre its content, well intentioned their actions or passionate their zeal. The subsequent stories about conspiracies and hidden agendas have been predictable.

A series of triumphal press releases by sceptical scientists - most of them not climate scientists - and the Saudi Arabian government, have rewritten the substance of this correspondence as a conspiracy rivalling the Moon landing, Kennedy and Diana all rolled into one. A redrawn graph has become, through careful selection of e-mails from an eleven-year correspondence, a deftly planned and audaciously executed defrauding of the public by climate scientists; a re-framing of a completely natural process of global warming and cooling into a man-made phenomenon.

Shock jocks and newspapers of a particular hue have exulted. Lurid headlines have gushed like light sweet crude and the hills are alive with the sound of baying hounds. Few of the stories I've read have made any mention of the actual contents of the e-mail messages, concentrating instead on gripping headline statements about deceit, conspiracy, fraud, manipulation, secrets and lies. Misinformation abounds. The facts are far less interesting.

Thus far there's been little speculation about the agenda of these evil climate scientists who have apparently been hoodwinking us all these years. What's in it for them ? Who's paying them ? There's not much money in windmills, and research grants hardly justify such a massive collusion and lengthy creative accounting effort.

Watergate taught us to follow the money, but the trail emanating from the global warming conspiracy theory doesn't seem to go anywhere. What about the trail leading from the sceptical camp ? Well, the charge on Copenhagen is being lead by the Saudi Arabian government. Ah....