Treehumper

Like so many people out there, we here at TreeHumper were deeply disturbed — deeply disturbed — by the revelations of possible massaging of data by climate experts at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. We dispatched our team of investigators to get to the bottom of the impropriety, and they’ve responded in grand fashion; we can now draw a clear picture of all the parties involved. This is ClimateFence: Anatomy of a Scandal!

The Big Picture
Think of ClimateFence like a human body. It has arms and legs, an unsightly torso with love handles, and a head. We’ll go through each of these body parts one by one, and we’ll show you how these “experts” managed to turn NOTHING into GLOBAL FUCKING WARMING, or whatever disastrous name we’ve given it now.

Legs
We’ll start from the bottom. These are the valiant foot soldiers (zing! I know, right?) who hacked the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia and retrieved more than 1,000 emails dating back more than a decade. We don’t know who they are. Because they’re covered by shoes. And pants.

Torso
This is the actual data, the hard numbers about global temperatures, carbon dioxide levels and predicted sea level rise. It is bloated and fat, rumbling with indigestion, and probably ridden with a few gastrointestinal tumors. Aside from the now public emails that showed some mild manipulation of data, TreeHumper has found that the actual rise in temperature since 1800 is LESS THAN 2 degrees! That’s nothing! Who the hell cares! Shoot this unsightly torso through the heart and let’s all move on.

Arms
These are the so-called climate experts, both those who actually wrote and received the emails as well as the rest of the community apparently suckered into the scientific “consensus.” They reacted to the hack by throwing punch after punch, aimed at the rest of the world in general. “It doesn’t change the science!” they said; “look at the data!” they cried; “we want to keep being considered experts at something!” they pleaded. Well TOO LATE.

Genitals
IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, of course. Tell me this guy doesn’t look like he’s one half of a set of anthropomorphized testicles. You can’t. You won’t.

Lungs
A number of heroic souls played the role of the lungs, blowing much-needed air behind the growing camp of skeptics to the consensus. Who better than noted climate and energy expert Sarah Palin to write an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining how this scandal calls attention to the huge list of questions we need to answer before doing anything rash like set emissions goals for the world. Yeoman’s work, lungs. Yeoman’s work.

Head
And the guy behind the guy behind the guy is, as usual, Al Gore. Who do you think has profited most from all these hockey stick graphs and inconvenient truths and whatnot? Gore. Our investigators have found definitive evidence — in the form of super convincing whispered testimony from this guy we met at a bar last week — that Gore set the ball rolling with the experts at East Anglia, convincing them to change their data to the extent that he could make a movie about the world warming up even while people in Norway continue to have to wear long sleeves by mid-September! It was Gore all along.

So there you have it. ClimateFence, while perhaps unseemly in its unfolding, has shown us the light about global warming. Everyone can go back to their regularly scheduled planetary practices; I hear Toyota might even except Prius trade-ins in light of the new information.

TreeHumper investigators… out.