Erasing Climate History

What do you do when there's some inconvenient historical data? Erase it:

A new report reveals a British scientist and Wikipedia administrator rewrote climate history, editing more than 5,000 unique articles in the online encyclopedia to cover traces of a medieval warming period – something Climategate scientists saw as a major roadblock in the effort to spread the global warming message.

Recently hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit expose a plot to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period, a 400-year era that began around A.D. 1000, the Financial Post's Lawrence Solomon reports.

The warming period is said to have improved agriculture and increased life spans, but scientists at the center of the Climategate e-mail scandal believed the era undermined their goal of spreading concern about global warming as it pertains to today's climate.

Solomon noted the warming period presented a dilemma long before the Climategate e-mail scandal.

A 1995 e-mail predating the recent Climate Research Unit scandal was sent to geophysicist David Deming. A major climate-change researcher told Deming, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

The Medieval Warm Period is what gave Greenland its name - it was green and not white and covered with ice.

The whole ClimateGate mess continues to unravel.