Junk Science: The Senate expects to take up global warming legislation by spring, but nothing more should happen in Congress on this issue until there's been a thorough probe of the ClimateGate scandal.

The scientists who have rung over and again the global warming alarm appear to be guilty of fraud. This we long suspected. Now, their own words, exposed by hackers who hijacked their e-mails, seem to confirm our suspicions.

For decades they've told us that the Earth is warming because of a greenhouse effect caused by man's carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. But what they've been telling each other isn't consistent with that story. The e-mails, more than a thousand of them, use phrases and terms such as "hide the decline," "trick" and "contain" (as in to conceal the Medieval Warm Period, an era in which temperatures might have been higher than today's).

There's also at least one damning admission — "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" — sent by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

There are attempts to conspire. Phil Jones, head of Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, wrote that "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Jones later warned a trio of colleagues: "Don't any of you three tell anybody that the U.K. has a Freedom of Information Act!"

There are attempts to silence dissenters.

Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told colleagues that "If you think that (Yale Professor James) Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official (American Geophysical Union) channels to get him ousted."

Wigley also wanted to "get rid of (Hans) von Storch," editor in chief of Climate Research, because "he encourages the publication of crap science." "Crap science" refers, of course, to research that doesn't agree with the alarmists.

And there are the attempts to deceive. Jones wrote that "We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

These scientists, if they can still be called that, have successfully conned the world into believing that radical and costly remediation is needed to stop the planet from overheating. They have needlessly menaced people and taken taxpayer funds to perpetuate the deception. They need to he held accountable. Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environmental and Public Works Committee, and Lord Lawson, British chancellor under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, are right to be calling for investigations.

Lord Monckton of Britain, a skeptic like Inhofe and Lawson, has reacted a bit more bitterly, saying these researchers "are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers."

They might well be.

But first, let's have an honest and thorough probe. We suspect one will, at the very least, expose the layers of deceit that the alarmists have been laying down and end their campaign of fear.

And if it turns out that any of them took money from either the U.S. or British governments under fraudulent circumstances, then they should be prosecuted as crooks.