Stalin once said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

A similar principle can be applied to global warming. It doesn’t matter whether the planet is actually warming to people like Al Gore. What is actually important is who gets to manipulate the climate data, and how.

You see, it’s very easy to “prove” the earth is warming when you play these sort of games with the data:

Two months after “climategate” cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

…Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.

We’ve set up a system where scientists who say that global warming is occurring are showered with praise and grant money, while those deny it are vilified and treated like pariahs. In that sort of environment, it’s no surprise that this sort of massive corruption has soaked down into the bones of the scientific establishment.

Careers should end over this sort of data manipulation, but instead it’ll probably be deliberately minimized and ignored.