For the past couple of weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing over the “climategate” documents. I managed to download a copy of the documents, but work, reading for pleasure and Modern Warfare 2 have prevented me from going through them.

Luckily, others have more time and more personal interests at stake. The analyses of the e-mails and computer code found at sites such as Watts Up With That and Climate Audit (mirror site here because the latter has been getting hammered) have revealed a picture of activists masquerading as scientists using their power and influence to increase their prestige and siphon billions from governments.

Perhaps the most telling example of scientific misconduct is the curtain that has been pulled back on Willis Eschenbach’s FOI request to the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit that was repeatedly denied. While Eschenbach is trying to get weather data, e-mails reveal “scientists” circling the wagons as they conspire to deny data to Eschenbach and others. The e-mails are shocking. Try to imagine the media coverage if these were Exxon/Mobil executives conspiring to hide evidence from Congress.

The failure of the American news media to fully report on this scandal is little short of criminal. Wonder why they' don’t report on this? Because it’s for your own good. Far too many journalists get into the business because they want to change the world or fix it and make it fairer. They think the world will be a better place with less CO2, so the narrative will be maintained.

And that’s the crux of the evil that these “scientists” have been perpetrating for the past two decades. I use the term evil advisedly.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens noted this morning, even setting aside Al Gore’s carbon credit racket, there are billions of dollars at stake in maintaining the lie.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

What impact could that kind of cash had if it were directed towards clean water, DDT spraying and mosquito nets in Africa?

In the coming days, President Obama and other world leaders will arrive in Copenhagen, Denmark, to talk about how to reduce CO2 emissions. Why? Because of “green” activism masquerading as science. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It’s what we humans exhale with every breath and it’s what every plant needs to grow.

Every dime spent on Al Gore’s carbon credits or used to subsidize “green energy” that is not cost efficient is money that could  be used elsewhere to alleviate real human suffering.

In fact, when Gore accepts $1,209 to shake his hand at Copenhagen next week, that’s money that won’t go to to decreasing human suffering on planet earth, but increasing it. You see, today so-called fossil fuels – whether they be in the form of natural gas or crude oil – deliver the most energy for the lowest cost. Gore and his acolytes want to raise that cost – for no justifiable reason. While Americans and Europeans can most likely afford these artificially high prices (though we won’t like it), those in Third World countries cannot. What is a convenience to us is life and death to them.

There’s a movie out on the Internet called “Not Evil, Just Wrong” about the global warming fraud. I disagree with the title. They’re wrong, and they are doing evil. They don’t intend to do evil, but it is evil all the same. If you granted Gore and his friends their every wish, the net result would be more pain, more poverty and more suffering the world over.

That’s the real scandal.