Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Climate Change Conspiracy Troofers

Great article on climate change conspiracies:
When leading climate scientists are repeatedly exonerated after the "climategate" pseudo-scandal, then to climate "sceptics" this simply means that the relevant enquiries were pre-programmed to find nothing wrong. Thus, the U.K. Parliament conspired to produce a whitewash of Professor Jones a few weeks ago, as did Lord Oxburgh when his panel, constituted with the advice of the Royal Society, found earlier this month that climate researchers "... did a public service of great value by carrying out much time-consuming meticulous work on temperature records." The scurrilous thinking of conspiracy theorists is best exemplified by an Australian tabloid blogger, whose "evidence" for a whitewash derived from the fact that Lord Oxburgh ... rides a bicycle! Yes, Lord Oxburgh rides a bicycle. And being a cyclist clearly implicates one in a grand conspiracy designed to deny others the pleasures of life that are seemingly only attainable by emitting vast quantities of CO2.

The same tabloid scribe strayed close to psychiatric territory by hinting that the recent shut-down of European airspace after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull was unnecessary because the decision relied on data from computer models which — what else! — were the same ones that predict global warming. Never mind that the recent ash clouds were traced by satellites and radar. And never mind that the last time a 747 flew into volcanic ash its four engines stalled and that only considerable skill and luck saved the lives of hundreds of terrified passengers. Never mind that a Finnish F-18 and a Belgian F-16 suffered engine damage from ash earlier this month. Never mind anything by way of actual evidence ... never mind that countless lives might be put at risk by a conspiracy theory.

As you can see the conspiracy has to get ever bigger to include all of the contrary data; bigger and bigger with more and more people 'recruited' - so more and more opportunities for whistleblowers and evidence of the conspiracy.... which never seems to come.

One of the commentators alerts us to an interesting point; crank magnetism - that crazy attracts crazy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Taxi

DaveMcRae said...

It was a good writeup - and the comments section was such a spray of crazy that just confirmed exactly what the prof had written.

anarchist said...

Indeed, Dave - the comments section was the final full stop that made the argument!