With Hurricane Matthew wreaking havoc, the Left is predictably seizing the storm as a means of promoting their radical global warming agenda. Climate change has not been a major theme this election cycle, but Hillary Clinton is now trying to turn it into one, with the help of global warming guru Al Gore. Unfortunately for the climate change alarmists, despite all the celebrity endorsements and high-minded rhetoric, the facts keep getting in the way. Here are nine things you need to know about the climate change hoax.

1. The Climategate scandal proved that key data involving man-made climate change was manipulated. In 2009, the public discovered emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit exposing how scientists who have been enormously influential in promoting the concept of man-made climate change actually attempted to cook the books to obtain results that served their narrative that the planet was heating at a dangerous trend due to higher levels of carbon dioxide.

One of these scientists included Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming. Hansen, Philip Jones, Michael Mann, et al. were all involved in trying “to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming,” according to the leaked emails. The emails also revealed how this cabal of scientists would discuss various ways to stonewall the public from seeing the “background data on which their findings and temperature records were based,” even going as far as deleting significant amounts of data. They would engage in efforts to smear “any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work.”

2. The Climategate scandal was given new life in 2011, with the release of new emails. The new round of leaked emails at the time provided more teeth to the revelations of 2009. Here are a couple of egregious emails from Jones found, via Forbes:

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,” writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

An email written by Mann showed that he tried to get “an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” a climate skeptic scientist named Steven McIntyre.

3. NASA may have also been involved in manipulating data to serve the narrative of man-made climate change. The Washington Times reported in 2009: “Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.”

Since this occurred at around the same time as the Climategate scandal, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a lawsuit to get NASA to release their relevant data sets on this issue and was able to expose emails from NASA that revealed a disturbing fact: the agency admitted “that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit,” reported Fox News in 2010 – meaning NASA climate change data sets were less accurate than the organization embattled with manipulating data sets.

A 2015 Washington Times editorial also highlighted another example of NASA cooking the books:

Paul Homewood, a skeptical researcher, found that in Paraguay, temperature readings for the 20th century at all nine weather stations supervised by NASA had been “adjusted” to transform a cooling trend into a warming trend. His analysis of readings in the Arctic found that rapid warming between 1920 and 1950 — before human activity could have increased the production of greenhouse gases — were adjusted downward so that the 1980s and ‘90s temperatures would stand out as warmer.

4. NASA also declared 2014 to be the hottest year on record – despite the fact that they were only 38 percent sure about it. The latter fact was left out of their press release at the time, as well as the fact that 2014 was supposedly hotter than the previous hottest year, 2010, by 0.02C – well within the margin of error of 0.1C that scientists tend to adhere by. The Washington Post attempted to spin in favor of NASA by arguing that NASA simply said that 2014 was the most likely hottest year on record – but their press release unequivocally stated that “2014 was the warmest year on record” and leaving out the aforementioned key facts makes such a declaration seem misleading, as it’s clearly not a guarantee that 2014 was even likely the hottest year on record.