Climate Aliens Stole my Goat!

It's conspiracy time again! Yes, we are witnessing the birth of extraordinary conspiracy theories into public life driven not by evidence, but by ideology and the childish unwillingness to face the truth:

Like the HAARP conspiracists, who believe that if they can prove that earthquakes in Haiti, Sichuan, Kobe, and Chile furthered US imperial interests then they have as good as proven that the US military artificially induced them, these Global Warming denialists conflate consequences with causes. If “a” benefits “b,” they seem to be thinking, then “b” must have had a hand in “a.” The existence of anthropogenic global warming necessitates global solutions, which empower international institutions. By the light of their faulty logic it follows that “a” must be a Trojan horse—a fraud concocted out of whole cloth by the International Elites, who are looking to impose their Global Supergovernment on a world that is in reality cooling. Ipso facto, the scientists whose research supports global warming must have been corrupted by the Elite’s money.

Thus “Climategate”—the hacked emails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. To put a conspiratorial counter spin on the alleged conspiracy, if they hadn’t been discovered, someone would have had to invent them. As early as 2003, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, then Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, had declared that “with all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.” Upon the release of the Climategate e mails he swiftly demanded a Congressional investigation of what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation.”

The release of 1000s of emails from the climate-hack didn't show any of the aledged conspiracy - a handful of emails about avioding FOI requests and use of the scientific term 'trick' do not a global cabal of evil scintists make. Indeedthe 1000s of emails should have been stuffed full of requests of fake data and instructing the 100s of other climate scintists in what the 'offical' line of the evil cabal was/is. But no - nothing. The climate-hack ws a damp squid for the conspiracy theorists.

The whole article is really worth reading, but here is the killer point;

In the real world, it seems, some scientists are no less subjective than English professors and politicians. But if it’s lucre that provides the motive for bad science, then it’s worth noting that there’s a lot more of it sloshing around the coal and oil industries (and for that matter, local TV news operations) than can be found at most research universities.