Wishful thinking: The death of global warming

There’s an article floating around the Internet from something called the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies that claims a group of scientists has proven that global warming can be connected to rising levels of benthic bacteria in the oceans’ shallows and not to anything humans do.

Designed to make global warming skeptics’ hearts leap for joy, the study provides everything us naysayers have been longing to hear, including a lucid refutation of global warming politics by credentialed researchers.

The phrase “too good to be true” has been proved once again. The study is apparently an elaborate hoax. The Web site for the journal was registered earlier this month. The only issue of the journal available is the current one, and in the table of contents, the only articles linked to are the study and an accompanying editorial. Also, at least a couple of the authors’ names associated with the study appear to be false.

It may be the case that the “study” was written by someone who genuinely disbelieves the current global warming hype (as rational people should) and who wants to “further the cause,” and that would just be sad to think someone would stoop to dishonesty of this sort to try to support a point. But I doubt that really is the case. It seems the real author of this piece of fiction had a very low opinion of the brain power of global warming skeptics. And that strikes me as the mind-set of some of global warming’s most strident acolytes.

To post something like this as disinformation would make perfect sense for the propagandists. If people had fallen for it, then you should not doubt that soon some liberal outlet such as MediaMatters or MoveOn.org would have blown the lid at an opportune moment.

But the skeptics didn’t fall for it — a point which is suggestive of the real heart of the dispute over global warming. The warming acolytes want to hammer us all into submission with the cudgel of “scientific consensus,” suggesting anyone who doesn’t go along is out there on the fringe by themselves. But, in fact, there are many of us doubters, and we doubt with good reason. We, not the believers, are the ones asking the questions, scrutinizing the data, using our brains and searching for the truth. If that were not the case, the recent hoax study would have been touted from the mountaintops, as the real author probably intended.

But in the end, people who are not content with anything less than the truth will eventually find it and show it to the world. That, more than anything else, is what scares the advocates of global warming.