Denying the global-cooling cover-up

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated the claim yesterday. This obtuseness exposes the Obama administration's complicity in aiding and abetting the fraud involved to stir up climate-change hysteria.

Responsibility for continuing to perpetuate this scandal goes all the way to the top. Mr. Obama ignored and thus belittled the controversy when he announced that he would be attending the upcoming Copenhagen global warming conference on Dec. 7. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is disregarding the fact that the very people caught up in Climategate are the very same ones who wrote the U.N. climate report that will form the basis of discussion at Copenhagen.

Ms. Browner might believe that there is no debate among scientists about global warming, but the lengths to which the authors of the U.N.'s IPCC controversial assessment report were willing to go belies that the science on the subject is anything but settled. For example, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the influential University of East Anglia, wrote in an e-mail: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Mr. Jones and Mr. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, were contributing authors to the United Nations report.

The partners in pettifoggery have yet to get their various stories straight. Mr. Jones has confirmed that the incriminating message is in fact an e-mail that he sent. But when reached over the weekend, Mr. Trenberth told The Washington Times, "I can reassure you that no such thing occurred." Mr. Trenberth, however, would not answer several questions about why Mr. Jones would make the claim he did to other academics. Mr. Trenberth also declined to answer any questions about whether he had ever talked to Mr. Jones about these topics.

Professor Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, took the ruse a step further and threatened journals that had the gall to publish academic research at odds with the global-warming theocracy. Upset that the journal Climate Research had published such a paper, Mr. Mann wrote: "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

Given Mr. Jones' frequent reference to destroying e-mails and the ensuing criticism from officials at his university for his destruction of them, the full extent of the global-warming deception is unlikely to ever be known. But revelations to date are concerning enough.

The destruction of data and e-mails, the refusal to respond to Freedom of Information requests and plotting to exclude from the IPCC report studies that questioned global warming are serious violations of academic standards. Obama administration officials are trying to dismiss this climate-change scandal, but doing so shows how they prioritize liberal politics over scientific integrity.