It's the ideology, stupid.

President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, claims that Climategate is not important and that global warming is settled science. "[The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has] been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," she said last week, six days after the scandal first broke about fudged global-warming research.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated the claim yesterday. This obtuseness exposes the Obama administration's complicity in aiding and abetting the fraud involved to stir up climate-change hysteria.

Responsibility for continuing to perpetuate this scandal goes all the way to the top. Mr. Obama ignored and thus belittled the controversy when he announced that he would be attending the upcoming Copenhagen global warming conference on Dec. 7. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is disregarding the fact that the very people caught up in Climategate are the very same ones who wrote the U.N. climate report that will form the basis of discussion at Copenhagen.

Ms. Browner might believe that there is no debate among scientists about global warming, but the lengths to which the authors of the U.N.'s IPCC controversial assessment report were willing to go belies that the science on the subject is anything but settled.

At bottom, it is ideology that is driving policy:

The destruction of data and e-mails, the refusal to respond to Freedom of Information requests and plotting to exclude from the IPCC report studies that questioned global warming are serious violations of academic standards. Obama administration officials are trying to dismiss this climate-change scandal, but doing so shows how they prioritize liberal politics over scientific integrity.

We have been documenting some very painful walkbacks by prominent climate change advocates who now say we must take a fresh look at the science, and more importantly, the data is now suspect and the entire issue needs re-examining. This is all that skeptics have wanted all along; a chance to participate in an open scientific debate.

Crashing the gates of the global warming priesthood may be the best thing to come out of climategate in the end.

Hat Tip: Ed Lasky