Writing about this week’s shockingly under-reported (at least in this country) “Climategate” scandal in the UK Telegraph, James Delingpole advises, “If you own any shares in alternative energy companies, I should start dumping them NOW.”

I mention this only because, had it not been for the Port of Bremerton’s protracted decision this past summer to abandon its Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) project, South Kitsap residents would now be very heavily (and perhaps irretrievably) invested in precisely the sort of companies he’s referring to.

In case you missed it, the international scandal, which the Melbourne (Australia) Herald-Sun describes as “the greatest in modern science,” involves computer hackers who broke into the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit database and made public scores of e-mails between the CRU and (formerly) prominent scientists from all over the world revealing a systematic campaign to misreport the dangers of man-made global warming — and, in fact, perpetrate a massive hoax.

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” reads one such e-mail, detailing how researchers whose data actually showed the earth was in the midst of a cooling trend routinely phonied up the evidence to make it appear we were on the verge of being burnt to a cinder.

And this isn’t just a few isolated eggheads we’re talking about. The CRU is the lead agency compiling data for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose projections are cited as gospel when global warming alarmists push for things like cap-and-trade legislation.

Closer to home, the 2009 Washington State Legislature directed the departments of Agriculture (WSDA), Commerce, Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, Natural Resources and Transportation to develop a comprehensive (read: expensive) strategy regarding climate change by Dec. 1, 2011.

Of course that was before a smoking gun was produced that shows global warming isn’t happening.

Not that anyone should expect the bureaucrats at these agencies to acknowledge the Climategate revelations.

They, like the fraudulent scientists caught red-handed, have too great a stake in perpetuating a con game that expands their own power bases.

But it won’t wash this time.

According to a Rasmussen Poll that came out even before Climategate broke, 47 percent of Americans believe any warming of the environment is due to natural factors, compared to 37 percent who believe it’s otherwise. This is a 10 percent swing in just the past year and a half — and remember, it came before people realized the earth wasn’t warming in the first place.

Which brings us back to SEED, whose backers earnestly assured us a green-technology business park would be a shrewd investment for the Port of Bremerton as the threat of global warming stampeded the world’s population toward environmentally friendly technologies.

It won’t happen — nor should it.

Thankfully, the powers-that-be at the port dodged a bullet by reluctantly yielding to common sense rather than hucksterism masquerading as science.

Instead, the port will now presumably develop an industrial park based on sound business practices rather than a political agenda whose whole premise has been exposed as a lie.

I’d feel a lot better if the port’s leaders had recognized they were building their tax-subsidized house on a foundation of sand at the time rather than simply bowing to public opinion in killing SEED. But sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.