UPDATE: I have to put this up top, because it’s so deliciously delightful. Turns out Rush Limbaugh fell for this scam, hook, line, and sinker. He bought it because he misunderstood a warning from notorious skeptic crank Roy Spencer — he thought Spencer was calling climate change, not the paper, a hoax. Spencer subsequently apologized for, um, Limbaugh’s stupidity and gullibility. Wow. I hardly know what to do with all this schadenfreude.
The world hardly needs any more proof that the remaining climate change "skeptics" (who among other things have ruined the perfectly respectable term "skeptic" for the rest of us) are ideologues who will believe anything that supports their position and disbelieve anything that refutes it. They keep offering us proof anyway.
Last week a paper was drifting around the tubes that allegedly showed that ocean bacteria, not humans, are responsible for most global warming. It was published in a heretofore never-heard-of online journal called Journal Of Geoclimatic Studies. It contained charts and graphs and other scientistical-type stuff, but what really gave the skeptics a stiffy was this passage toward the end:
But we recognise that in [overturning anthropogenic climate change] we lay our careers on the line. As we have found in seeking to broach this issue gently with colleagues, and in attempting to publish these findings in other peer-reviewed journals, the "consensus" on climate change is enforced not by fact but by fear. We have been warned, collectively and individually, that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding, but that we also jeopardise the funding of the departments for which we work.
We believe that academic intimidation of this kind contradicts the spirit of open enquiry in which scientific investigations should be conducted. We deplore the aggressive responses we encountered before our findings were published, and fear the reaction this paper might provoke. But dangerous as these findings are, we feel we have no choice but to publish.
Brave scientists battling the "consensus" cabal! This played perfectly to the fruitloop paranoia of the skeptics, so naturally they ate it up.
And naturally it’s a complete hoax.
DeSmogBlog has a detailed account of who created the hoax and who fell for it. Amusing stuff.
Postscript: The founder of the Weather Channel, who’s been a TV weatherman since 1952, says global warming is a scam. How does he — without, you know, practicing science or having a degree in the relevant disciplines — know this? He thought hard about it:
I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
