So now we know it – much of the global warming drama is nothing but a scam.

Earlier this month, hackers exposed hundreds of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) – one of the world’s leading climate change research centres – that appear to prove researchers faked and manipulated statistics.

The issue is, CRU’s research and archive of global temperature data form the basis of United Nation’s key reports on climate change. Therefore, if the data was fabricated or corrupted, the models supporting the global warming theory would also have been compromised.

The popular consensus is that global warming a) exists and b) is caused by human activity and industrialization. There are skeptics – even among scientists – disputing this thesis, and there has been plenty of data supporting a theory that global warming (and cooling) periods are caused by solar activity.

There has been a lack of an open debate on the issue, but that might change now. The leak of the damaging emails, causing a sensation around the globe, has been seized upon by global warming skeptics. I freely admit to being one of them.

CRU has for years been refusing to publish details of its temperature research data, so the exposed emails certainly don’t look very good. In some of them Phil Jones, CRU’s director, appears to suggest a ‘trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ of temperatures and lack of any warming.

So is this “the greatest act of scientific fraud in history”, as some US pundits have called it? It’s too early to tell for sure. But at least we might see an honest debate now, hopefully before governments start wasting trillions of tax payers’ money on (possibly) unnecessary legislation and measures.

Or perhaps I’m just being overly optimistic.