Leaked emails mark dangerous shift in climate denial strategy

[villager]

Leaked emails mark dangerous shift in climate denial strategy

Instead of targeting high-profile science communicators, climate deniers are now encouraging mistrust of those who collect and interpret global warming data



The theft and web publication by climate change deniers of private emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an extremely worrying development in the tortured politics of global warming.

Although high-profile individuals have been targeted and unfairly vilified before – Pennsylvania University's Michael Mann comes to mind, with his "hockey stick" palaeoclimate graph – most of the ire of the denial movement has so far been reserved for big-hitters like Al Gore. Gore can take it. Politics is his job.

But the "exposure" of private correspondence from a much larger group of scientists – and the out-of-context quotation of certain sentences as "revealing" some hidden subterfuge – suggests a dangerous shift in strategy. Instead of targeting the science communicators (myself included), the deniers are now declaring war on the scientists themselves. Like the creationists they unconsciously mimic, they make no distinction between the political and the scientific sphere – it is open season in both.

And the strategy is simple. Given that scientists are one of society's most trusted groups (unlike journalists or politicians), the climate denial movement has begun a battle to undermine public trust in climate scientists themselves. No more will the legions of anonymous researchers who collect and interpret data from meteorological stations, satellites and ice cores be considered above the fray – they now run the risk of personal attacks, exposure of their private lives and vilification.

It is important to understand the significance of this. Scientists are not politicians. They are not used to communicating publicly. They trust in their objectivity, the objectivity of their peers, and the rigour of only citing work published in learned journals. They will have private views, but are very used to keeping these out of their work – indeed the entire scientific method is based on conducting research which can be replicated by peers in order to check its accuracy and objectivity.

<snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/nov/23/climate-denial-strategy

[notesdev]

1. The real denial

is denying that the leaked emails show the assertions that the global temperature is rising are grounded in outright fraud.

Read 'em yourself, you will be left with no doubt whatsoever.

The biggest scientific scandal of the century, and all we get on DU is apologia and cover-up. This is extremely disappointing.

Thank God for the conscience of the document leaker to show us what has really been going on. I look forward to the day when these cheats and liars are sharing cells with their fellow travelers from Wall Street.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. How did that Koolaid taste?

[notesdev]

4. Tasted like the dishonest argumentation technique "ad hominem"

Which is ALL you got.

[DavidDvorkin]

11. It's pointless to respond seriously to

wackadoodle denialism.

[notesdev]

12. You do not respond seriously because you cannot

There is no serious case to defend the fraud. 'Lost' data, picked samples, deliberate deletion, refusal to archive, manipulation of review processes, even oil money... it's even documented right in their code that produces their graphs, that they are altering the results to conform to their preconceptions.

Let anyone look for themselves. Here are the files: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94

This is 2009 and people actually can and do check things out for themselves. You are a fool if you think this can be made to go away by pretending it doesn't exist.

There is no serious argument to be made in defense of these practices - any sane man can see that they are not a search for truth.

So crack open that book, you're not the first to try name calling for lack of a sound argument. I'm going to hand out a prize to whichever one of you manages to make it to four or more of them. You help me expose just how little sound argument you can bring to the table.

[DavidDvorkin]

13. So the scientific community is engaged

in a massive fraud and coverup, and there is no such thing as global warming? Is that your position?

[notesdev]

15. Appeal to authority

Really, you are quite predictable.

Please, do continue... or address the validity of the data and the conclusions and we can be serious.

[DavidDvorkin]

16. Is it your position that

the scientific community is engaged in a massive fraud and cover up, and global warming is a hoax?

[notesdev]

18. My position

With respect to the specific "scientists" in charge of the global temperature record on which IPCC and AGW warming claims are based, yes. The rest of the scientific community, no.

(and yes I can spot a generalization fallacy too)

[DavidDvorkin]

20. So you are indeed a wackadoodle denialist.

[Soylent Brice]

24. !!

:rofl:

[notesdev]

26. So you prove you have no facts and only ad hominem

Please do continue. You may not be aware of it, but I am aware that there are many people around here without your religious devotion to AGW, whose eyes are opening when they see what AGW proponents bring to the table - nothing.

[DavidDvorkin]

27. My religious devotion?

Where did you get that from?

[JohnWxy]

28. your position is that you know more about cllimate science than the actual, trained scientists

(numbering in the hundreds) actually conducting research on the climate do. THis is a proposition that demands proof and demonstration before it can be accepted. YOu claim to be an authority superior to all these bona fide scientists. You have to prove it.

It is not an appeal to authority, as you claim, to look to science done by scientists as a reliable method for developing an understanding of how the natural world works. This is an "appeal to science" and the reliance on the expertise of trained professionals in a given field of research. It is not realistic to propose that everybody evaluate all the availble data (after first spending years of study and practice to become qualified to evaluate such data) before making an appraisal of our climate predicament.

Even if you have training to evaluate the data pertaining to Global Warming (do you?) the fact that the over-whelming number of qualified experts have concluded GLobal Warming caused by human actions is a real phenomenon forces one to make a judgement whether you (unqualified, or are you qualified?) alone are right and all those trained scientists are wrong. The likelihood is actually quite strong that they are right and that you .... are a crackpot.

Go ahead and enjoy the attention you seek. There are those so hungry for attention, that they are happy to gain attention by being a 'freak-show' (i.e. by making outlandish assertions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) just to get that attention. Even if that attention brings ridicule they are not phased by it(as you are not phased by ridicule). Because some attention is better than no attention at all. This does not however, establish them as qualified to speak as knowledgeable sources of information on the matters about which they utter their pronouncements.


The weight of the evidence as evaluated by hundreds of QUALIFIED trained, scientists, who do actual research, is against you. As for myself, I am interested only in what individuals who are qualified to evaluate the data and models, have to say on the subject.

[DavidDvorkin]

29. Excellent post

Thanks.

An appeal to science is an appeal to the self-correcting nature of science. If there really were a coverup, there'd also be large numbers of scientists eagerly exposing the coverup, just as they'd be eagerly debunking any fake science involved. I'm not sure that the wackadoodle denialists really understand that.

[notesdev]

31. You're no trained scientist

but you claim to speak with the authority of one.

That's the practice of a religion. You've turned 'science' into a god, ignoring what the word itself means. You spend more time ridiculing those who would challenge your beliefs than actually looking to see whether your beliefs are not well-grounded.

What I have learned as to how thin the actual scientific grounds for the AGW allegation are, I was amazed at the audacity. Apparently there is only one custodian of the global temperature record, which are the people whose sordid/illegal methods have been exposed to the world. It is on their word alone that the AGW alarmism is based.

What gives scientific credibility to their word? Is it the peer-review where they've arranged to be reviewed only by those who share their bias? Is it the deliberate intent to hide data and not to show their work? Is it the skill in fighting off FOIA requests, the declared intent to delete data before releasing it?

If this is how the 'authority' operates, any sane person would tell him to go fuck himself. George Bush was in authority for 8 years, if I need remind your selective memory. Goldman Sachs is the authority in investment banking. What makes scientists immune to the enticements of the short term gains to be found from cheating and lying?

Or is it that you've been brainwashed by repetition of ideas that you didn't bother to check out. The hockey-stick graph - the one that says the earth is getting hotter - has no independent verification. It's based on tree ring and pine cone dendrochronography that plant physiologists say is unequivocally counter to the accepted understanding.

And when you drill down into the data, you can see it right there - it's one damn tree Mann picked when he was cherry picking at the data, amplifying a stacked statistical technique that would produce a hockey stick even with white noise in it.

One fucking tree. Look it up your goddamn self, YAD061. One data point out of a statistically-insufficient 15 tree cores, on which the entire basis of the hockey stick, and thus the allegation of current global warming (which curiously contradicts directly measured instrumentation) is based. The entire 'global warming' branch of climate science is dominated by a handful of people deliberately collaborating in scientific fraud, backed by an industry fueled with hundreds of billions of dollars. None of this is independently verifiable, we're taking one group's word for it and that word alone.

We're going to make massive social and economic changes based on their word? And they won't show their data but all of humanity is supposed to change the way we live? If you find this logical, you need to examine what might be an appropriate burden of truth.

This is big business stuff. You think they could back down if they were honest about the data and said, hmm, well, it's not really warming now, is it? (please don't pepper me with cherry-picked anecdotes, exhibiting the same data selection error at issue here.)

So take your appeal to authority fallacy and stick it where the sun don't shine. Don't be a drone mindlessly regurgitating propaganda for your corporate masters. Dare to think for yourself for once.

[Ghost Dog]

32. As regards the paleoclimate (tree-ring) research, you may not bother to read

and try to understand (after all, it's easier just to regurgitate 'teabag' propaganda?):

Dummies guide to the latest “Hockey Stick” controversy
18 February 2005 by Gavin Schmidt and Caspar Amman

Due to popular demand, we have put together a ‘dummies guide’ which tries to describe what the actual issues are in the latest controversy, in language even our parents might understand. A pdf version is also available. More technical descriptions of the issues can be seen here and here.

This guide is in two parts, the first deals with the background to the technical issues raised by McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05), while the second part discusses the application of this to the original Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) (MBH98) reconstruction. The wider climate science context is discussed here, and the relationship to other recent reconstructions (the ‘Hockey Team’) can be seen here.

NB. All the data that were used in MBH98 are freely available for download at ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/sdr/temp/nature/MANNETAL98/ (and also as supplementary data at Nature) along with a thorough description of the algorithm.

/--> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy/

[notesdev]

33. That doesn't address the core issues

which is no surprise, since it's written by the people who don't want to address them.

The core issues are the cherry-picking of data for analysis, and the validity of the analysis itself. Both are strongly in dispute and no good answers are being provided to either question, even under repeated inquiry.

If you inspect your own behavior honestly you will find that your post was in fact the regurgitation of propaganda. First understand the issue well enough to address it, then we can talk serious.

[Ghost Dog]

34. This kind of 'cherry-picked' unavailable data and analysis, you mean?

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf

Or are you referring to the 'cherry-picked' emails?

Perhaps you could point me in the direction of the science that refutes the above?

Science is all about asking questions and self-criticism, but it would be a stretch to call it propaganda. Messages, whether based on science or not, intended to influence public opinion are propaganda, employing the term in an ideologically-neutral sense, and for sure there is a lot of propaganda, with different motivations, on all sides of this debate. While, for example, there may be much that is well-grounded and worthy of properly-funded research mentioned in this type of propaganda, and while there may be much that is ideologically- politically- and economically-motivated, almost by definition, in the messages adopted by the public policy movement (such as Copenhagen) to encourage or even require us to intelligently adapt to predicted climate change, the underlying science can really only be challenged on sound scientific grounds. Otherwise, the debate would degenerate to the level of Creationism, for example.

It has been my understanding that political and economic forces, yes, including, unfortunately, greedy and corrupt crony capitalist forces, must be brought to bear in the attempt to intelligently adapt to climate change because, at least outside totalitarian systems, that is the way human society works. Perhaps it would be better were this not the case, and perhaps this is what some of the debate really needs to be about, but to deny the validity of the whole body of our best science on the subject to date is quite simply irrational.

[WriteDown]

5. What few fail to see is that even if global warming is absolutely real...

stuff like this is extremely damaging. Let the evidence speak for itself. There really is no need to play fast and loose.

This whole affair reminds me a bit of when Palin's emails were hacked.

[Ghost Dog]

7. True enough. The 'alleged' hacked material is here:

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php

Really, for those who can spare the time and can get over any scruples about illicitly reading others' emails uninvited, do look and see for yourselves. I haven't come across any evidence of 'playing fast and loose' so far, but haven't spent much time on it yet.

:shrug:

But, of course the talk-show propagandists etc. are able to make a big deal out of this, knowing that very few people will look at and analyse this data intelligently for themselves.

Such are the dumbed-down times some cultures find themselves living in.

[Ghost Dog]

6. Sorry, but I've read through some of this material

(such as areas the 'skeptics' point to), and I've so far seen no 'smoking gun', just quite polite (although occasionally a little acrimonious) email debate amongst scientists mostly about the design of papers written for scientific publications and bodies such as the IPCC.

See this selection, for example (selected on keyword 'mann'). Where is your evidence of fraud, please? What can be seen appears to be perfectly normal discussion amongst researchers and research managers in a field which never has been, and probably never will be an "exact science".

The deniers would appear to be bluffing, or merely continuing to bamboozle themselves.

[notesdev]

14. Link not working for me

Here are the files themselves, all 61MB of them: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94

You can see for yourself exactly what the contents are and what they confess. There's quite a bit of malfeasance in there, so it's hard to say just which is the worst.

The specific details over the data points in dispute are described here. What is documented in the files are specific deliberate manipulations of data to conform to what that original work asserts. Here is someone who has documented many of the same stuff that I saw, which you can verify yourself with the original files provided above. Here is another.

[Ghost Dog]

19. That sounds like a 'convenient' excuse?

I am pointing to an online searchable database of this material, homepage here: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/

By way of example, and with apologies for the length of this extract, this is the kind of debate that the weirdos are freaking out about:

Return to the index page | Earlier Emails | Later Emails

From: Phil Jones <[email protected]>
To: Michael Mann <[email protected]>, Jim Salinger <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: ENSO blamed over warming - paper in JGR
Date: Tue Jul 28 10:15:45 2009
Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Gavin Schmidt <[email protected]>

Jim et al,
Having now read the paper in a moment of peace and quiet, there are a few things
to bear in mind. The authors of the original will have a right of reply, so need to
ensure that they don't have anything to come back on. From doing the attached a
year or so ago, there is a word limit and also it is important to concentrate only
on a few key points. As we all know there is so much wrong with the paper, it
won't be difficult to come up with a few, but it does need to be just two or three.
The three aspects I would emphasize are
1. The first difference type filtering. Para 14 implies that they smooth the series
with a 12 month running mean, then subtract the value in Jan 1980 from that in
Jan 1979, then Feb 1980 from Feb 1979 and so on. As we know this removes
any long-term trend.
The running mean also probably distorts the phase, so this is possibly why
they get different lags from others. Using running means also enhances the
explained variance. Perhaps we should repeat the exercise without the smoothing.
2. Figure 4 and Figure 1 show the unsmoothed GTTA series. These clearly have a
trend. Perhaps show the residual after extracting the ENSO part.
3. They do the same first difference on the smoothed SOI. The SOI doesn't explain
the climate jump in the 1976/77 period. Their arguments in para 30 are all wrong.
A few minor points
- there are some negative R*R values just after equation 3.
- I'm sure Tom Wigley wouldn't have proposed El Nino events occurring after volcanoes!
Attached this paper as well. From a quick read it doesn't say what is purported - in
fact
it seems to show clearly how the analysis should have been done.
- there is a paper by Ben Santer (more recent) where he applies the same type
of extraction procedure to models. I'll send this separately as it is large. In case it
is too large here is the reference.
Santer, B.D., Wigley, T.M.L., Doutriaux, C., Boyle, J.S., Hansen, J.E., Jones, P.D.,
Meehl, G.A., Roeckner, E., Sengupta, S. and Taylor K.E., 2001: Accounting for the effects
of volcanoes and ENSO in comparisons of modeled and observed temperature trends. Journal
of Geophysical Research 106, 2803328059.
Finally I've attached a paper I wrote in 1990, where I did something similar to
what they did. I looked at residuals from a Gaussian filter, and I added
the smoothed data back afterwards. I was working at the annual timescale
and I did have many more years.
Cheers
Phil
At 00:19 25/07/2009, Michael Mann wrote:

Hi Jim,
Grant Foster ('Tamino') did a nice job in a previous response
(attached) we wrote to a similarly bad article by Schwartz which got a
lot of play in contrarian circles.
since he's already done some of the initial work in debunking this, I
sent him an email asking hi if we was interested in spearheading a
similar effort w/ this one.
let me get back to folks after I've heard back from him, and we can
discuss possible strategy for moving this forward,
mike
On Jul 24, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Jim Salinger wrote:

Kia orana All from the Tropical South Pacific
Yes, Phil, a bit like 'A midsummer night's dream!'. and Gavin
Tamino's bang up job is great, And good that you go up with stuff on
Real Climate, Mike. As Kevin is preoccupied, for the scientific
record we need a rebuttal somewhere pulled together. Who wants to
join in on the multiauthored effort?? I am happy to coordinate it.
Return to 'winter' this evening after enjoying a balmy south east
trades and sunny dry 24 C in the Cook Islands.
Jim
Quoting Michael Mann <[email protected]>:

folks, we're going to go up w/ something brief on RealClimate
later today, mostly just linking to other useful deconstructions
of the paper already up on other sites,
mike
On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:01 PM, Jim Salinger wrote:

I am tied up next week, but could frame something up the
following week which , I hope would be multi-authored. It would
be quite good to have a rebuttal from the same Department at Uni
of Auckland (which Glenn McGregor of IJC is director of)!
I haven't had tne oportunity to download the text here in the
Cook Islands, so this would give me the opportunity to do that.
Who else wants to join in??
Jim
Quoting Kevin Trenberth <[email protected]>:

I am on vacation today and don't have the time. I have been on
travel the
past 4 weeks (including AR5 IPCC scoping mtg); the NCAR summer
Colloquium
is coming up in a week and then I am off to Oz and NZ for 3 weeks
(GEWEX/iLeaps, CEOP) and I have an oceanobs'09 plenary paper to do.
Kevin

a formal comment to JGR seems like a worthwhile undertaking here.
contrarians will continue to cite the paper regardless of
whether or
not its been rebutted, but for the purpose of future scientific
assessments, its important that this be formally rebutted in
the peer-
reviewed literature.
mike
On Jul 23, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Jim Salinger wrote:

Hi All
Thanks for the pro-activeness. Is there an opportunity to write a
letter to JGR pointing out the junk science in this??....if it is
not rebutted, then all sceptics will use this to justify their
position.
Jim
Quoting Michael Mann <[email protected]>:

2nd email
________
Thanks Kevin, hadn't even noticed that in my terse initial
skim of
it. yes--that makes things even worse than my initial
impression.
this is a truly horrible paper. one wonders who the editor was,
and what he/she was thinking (or drinking),
m
On Jul 23, 2009, at 3:51 PM, Kevin Trenberth wrote:

I just looked briefly at the paper. Their relationships use
derivatives
of the series. Well derivatives are equivalent to a high pass
filter,
that is to say it filters out all the low frequency
variability and
trends.
If one takes y= A sin wt
and does a differentiation one gets
dy = Aw cos wt.
So the amplitude goes from A to Aw where w is the frequency
= 2*pi/
L where
L is the period.
So the response to this procedure is to reduce periods of 10
years by a
factor of 5 compared with periods of 2 years, or 20 and 50
years get
reduced by factors of 10 an 25 relative to two year periods.
i.e. Their
procedure is designed to only analyse the interannual
variability
not the
trends.
Kevin

hi Seth, you always seem to catch me at airports. only got a
few
minutes. took a cursory look at the paper, and it has all the
worry
signs of extremely bad science and scholarship. JGR is a
legitimate
journal, but some extremely bad papers have slipped through
the
cracks
in recent years, and this is another one of them.
first of all, the authors use two deeply flawed datasets that
understate the warming trends: the Christy and Spencer MSU
data and
uncorrected radiosonde temperature estimates. There were a
series
of
three key papers published in Science a few years ago, by
Mears
et al,
Santer et al, and Sherwood et al.
see Gavin's excellent RealClimate article on this:
<1>http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/et-tu- lt/
these papers collectively showed that both datasets were
deeply
flawed
and understate actual tropospheric temperature trends. I
find it
absolutely remarkable that this paper could get through a
serious
review w/out referencing any 3 of these critical papers-- papers
whose
findings render that conclusions of the current article
completely
invalid!
The Christy and Spencer MSU satellite-derived tropospheric
temperature
estimates contained two errors--a sign error and an algebraic
error--
that had the net effect of artificially removing the
warming trend.
Christy and Spencer continue to produce revised versions of
the MSU
dataset, but they always seem to show less warming than
every other
independent assessment, and their estimates are largely
disregarded by
serious assessments such as that done by the NAS and the IPCC.
So these guys have taken biased estimates of tropospheric
temperatures
that have artificially too little warming trend, and then
shown,
quite
unremarkably, that El Nino dominates much of what is left (the
interannual variability).
the paper has absolutely no implications that I can see at all
for the
role of natural variability on the observed warming trend
of recent
decades.
other far more careful analyses (a paper by David Thompson
of CSU,
Phil Jones, and others published in Nature more than year
ago)
used
proper, widely-accepted surface temperature data to estimate
the
influence of natural factors (El Nino and volcanos) on the
surface
temperature record. their analysis was so careful and
clever that
it
detected a post-world war II error in sea surface temperature
measurements (that yields artificial cooling during the mid
1940s)
that had never before been discovered in the global surface
temperature record. needless to say, they removed that
error too.
and
the correct record, removing influences of ENSO, volcanoes,
and
even
this newly detected error, reveal that a robust warming of
global mean
surface temperature over the past century of a little less
than 1C
which has nothing to do w/ volcanic influences or ENSO
influences. the
dominant source of the overall warming, as concluded in every
legitimate major scientific assessment, is anthropogenic
influences
(human greenhouse gas concentrations w/ some offsetting
cooling
due to
sulphate aerosols).
this later paper provides absolutely nothing to cast that in
doubt. it
uses a flawed set of surface temperature measurements for
which the
trend has been artificially suppressed, to show that whats
left
over
(interannual variability) is due to natural influences. duh!
its a joke! and the aptly named Mark "Morano" has fallen for
it!
m
On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Borenstein, Seth wrote:

Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that
Marc Morano
is hyping wildly. It's in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
Seth Borenstein
Associated Press Science Writer
[email protected]
The Associated Press, 1100 13th St. NW, Suite 700,
Washington, DC
20005-4076
202-641-9454
The information contained in this communication is intended
for
the
use
of the designated recipients named above. If the reader of
this
communication is not the intended recipient, you are hereby
notified
that you have received this communication in error, and
that any
review,
dissemination, distribution or copying of this
communication is
strictly
prohibited. If you have received this communication in error,
please
notify The Associated Press immediately by telephone at
[phone]
and delete this e-mail. Thank you.

msk dccc60c6d2c3a6438f0cf467d9a4938
<McLean2008JD011637.pdf>

On Jul 23, 2009, at 7:57 PM, Jim Salinger wrote:

Precisely.
Mike Mann: You better rush something up on RealClimate. Jim,
Brett, myself and maybe others will have to deal with the
local
fallout this will cause...oh dear......
Bye the way June was the warmest month on record for the oceans
according tro NOAA
Jim
Quoting Kevin Trenberth <[email protected]>:

Exactly
They use 2 datasets that are deficient in the first place and
then they
use derivatives: differentiation is a high pass filter, and so
they show
what we have long known that ENSO accounts for a lot of high
frequency
variability. It should not have been published
Kevin

kia orana from Rarotonga
How the h... did this get accepted!!
Jim
Dominion today {24/7/09]
Nature blamed over warming - describing recently published
paper
in
JGR by Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter and J McLean, and
including
comment by J Salinger "little new"
McLean J. D., C. R. de Freitas, R. M. Carter (2009),
Influence
of the
Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature, J. Geophys.
Res.,
114, D14104, doi:10.1029/2008JD011637.
paper at
<2>http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml
--
Associate Professor Jim Salinger
School of Geography and Environmental Science
University of Auckland

/... http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=988&filename=.txt

[TrogL]

25. Is "painting with a broad brush" and "throwing out the baby with the bathwater"...

...the same logical fallacy?

[Soylent Brice]

23. *AHEM*

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7055930&mesg_id=7055930

[babylonsister]

2. Sounds like they were stolen, then leaked. Odd title. nt

[drm604]

8. Why don't people think things through?

Haven't the deniers wondered why it is that they, non-scientists, have been able to see through the supposed scam while thousands of scientists haven't? Thousands of scientists looking at large amounts of independent data over decades have come to the same or similar conclusions. Namely, that the climate is warming and that at least some, if not all, of that warming is caused by human activities.

If it's as easy to "debunk" it as the deniers seem to think then why hasn't science abandoned the idea?

And if the scientists aren't being being fooled then either they're right, or they're all involved in one giant conspiracy.

If it's a conspiracy then why, and how?

Why would nearly the entire scientific community fake something like this?

How would the entire scientific community fake something like this? Do they spike the drinks at science conventions with mind control drugs?

It's as bad as or worse than the moon landing conspiracy nonsense.

[spiritual_gunfighter]

21. It's worse than the moon landing hoax

The moon landing didn't have these kind of consequences. Climate change denial is the most dangerous of all conspiracy theories. Much more insideous than the birthers.

[drm604]

22. Obviously the consequences are far worse.

I was talking about the stupidity of the conspiracy theory. The logic behind it is as bad or worse as the logic behind the Moon nonsense.

As far as the consequences, it is obviously far far worse.

[Blue_Tires]

30. i blame Michael Crichton, among others...

his "novel" really gave credence to the loons wanting to believe in the "massive conspiracy cover-up"

[Uncle Joe]

9. Attacking and smearing the messengers because they can't attack the facts.

Don't believe your eyes as to what's actually happening around the world, trash the most knowledgeable people warning you and your family about it.

This has been the corporate supremacists' standard operating procedure for decades.

When judges ruled by any sense of reason or compassion grounded in the law, they were labeled as "activist judges." This demonizing of the judiciary and the false myth of Republicans; being "strong on crime" when they really don't give a rat's ass, has resulted in draconian laws being passed that now allow "The land of the free" with 5% of the Earth's population to boast as being number 1 with a record breaking 25% of the world's prisoners. This wasn't done to stop crime, but to disenfranchise the American People from their government, and thus further the aims of corporate supremacy by weakening "We the peoples'" government. A phrase so anathema to current core Republican beliefs that Boehner couldn't even bring him self to cite the actual Preamble to the Constitution; a contract he swore an oath to uphold and defend.

When journalists exposed political abuse, corruption and threats against the Constitution by the likes of Nixon, white collar crime or corporate rape of the environment they were labeled as the "liberal media." Another bullshit myth to hide corporate control over most of that institution ultimately resulting in the enabling of a corrupt/incompetent obtaining the most powerful job in the land in 2000, a total disparity between what the best peer reviewed science was telling us regarding the looming catastrophe of global warming climate change and the reporting of it; (as for the morons out there climate changes are the symptoms, global warming is the disease), a costly; in blood, treasure and world esteem, premeditated war based on lies, etc. etc.

Both demonizing the judiciary and the press were myths intended to intimidate those institutions from actually doing their jobs with a high degree of integrity; because that integrity threatened the corporate supremacists' narrow short term interests by placing the welfare of the American People above them.

Now it's the scientists turn to be demonized by those greed worshiping deniers and corrupters of reality, but in this case, combined with the previous two, should they succeed, it won't just be the American Peoples' Constitutional rights, freedom, lives and treasure at risk but humanity itself or at the very least society's existence.

Thanks for the thread, villager.

[ShamelessHussy]

10. it is scary to contemplate that they (the folks behind the curtain) think they can pull this off

'this' being; science is a fraud.

sheesh, i thought this debate was settled with the Renaissance..., I guess it just goes to show how naive i am :shrug:

[Andronex]

17. Thanks for posting.

Hopefully this will be given as much exposure as possible.

[excess_3]

35. the mistrust is deserved

some people lie for a living