The fudging of climate science is much broader and deeper than the Climategate email embarrassment would lead one to believe. Guesswork is rife:

Claims by the world’s leading climate scientists that most of the Himalayan glaciers will vanish within 25 years were last night exposed as nonsense.

The alarmist warning appeared two years ago in a highly influential report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At the time the IPCC insisted that its report contained the latest and most detailed evidence yet of the risks of man-made climate change to the planet.

But the experts behind the warning have now admitted their claim was not based on hard science – but a news story that appeared in the magazine New Scientist in the late 1990s.

That story was itself based on a telephone conversation with an Indian scientist who has since admitted it was little more than speculation.

And figures have been fiddled:

Certified consulting meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo of Icecap.us and a computer programmer from San Jose, Michael Smith, have written an expose of extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the federal government’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. D’Aleo says in the report, “NOAA is seriously complicit in data manipulation and fraud.

four key revelations:

1. NCDC is no longer monitoring many actual temperature stations. Coleman explains, “In the transition to a computer averaging system, the National Data Climate Center deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it evolved to a system of global grid boxes. The number that goes into each grid box is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more weather observation stations nearest that grid box.” This method is inaccurate according to D’Aleo because “temperatures are not linear over space, but instead vary enormously because of differences in terrain, elevation, vegetation, water versus land and urbanization.” It also makes an apples and oranges situation, comparing today’s averaged grid boxes to past actual station temperatures.

2. The number of weather stations NCDC uses was reduced 75%, from approximately 6,000 to 1,000 stations.

3.  The vast majority of the stations cut from the record were from the cooler higher latitudes and altitudes. Smith says, “The more I looked, the more I found patterns of deletion that could not be accidental. Thermometers moved from cold mountains to warm beaches; from Siberian Arctic to more southerly locations and from pristine rural locations to jet airport tarmacs. The last remaining Arctic thermometer in Canada is in a place called ‘The Garden Spot of the Arctic,’ always moving away from the cold and toward the heat.”

4.  Temperatures then were altered by “homogenization,” a process which always seemed to result in higher readings. According to the report,”the data centers then performed some final adjustments to the gathered data before final analysis. These adjustments are in some cases frequent and undocumented. Examining raw data versus processed final data shows numerous examples where the adjusted data shows a warming trend where the raw data had little change.”

In fact, it’s getting to the point where the only people who still believe in global warming are the non compos mentis inhabitants of the dusty corners of derelict liberal churches represented by dotty United Church Moderators and batty Anglican bishops.