Global Warming: The Conspiracy Conspiracy

It appears that in spite of Al Gore telling us that the debate on man-caused global warming is over, that this is in fact far from the case. As the furor over recently released emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit shows (the definitive source of information on the subject), what we may know about the debate is that instead it has been being manipulated. 


As reported this week the the Wall Street Journal, it appears that there has been a systematic effort to suppress, refute, and repudiate any dissenting views other than that global warming is man-caused. When the scientists (and I use this term sarcastically) disagreed with an opinion not their own, they simply denied publishing access in prestigious publications to it. When the publication was not under their "peer-reviewed" control, they dismissed the publication itself. 


Having now had their nefarious goals and means revealed to the unwashed public, the claim is simply that the emails in question are being taken out of context or misunderstood. There is also a claim that the timing of the release of these emails, right before the Copenhagen Climate Conference scheduled for December 6-18, is more than suspicious. 


Even granting this to be the case however, none of the people in question are denying that the emails released are false or fabricated, or that they did not in fact say the things in these emails. 


For myself, I find it interesting this the most fascinating part of the story. A group which has been systematically acting as a Conspiracy to suppress any dissenting opinion and ridicule any dissent of its position is now crying "Conspiracy" when their own is revealed. Rather than actively defend what are apparently manufactured and predetermined results to the data gathered, they simply claim that the other guys isn't playing fair. I have never believed that the scientific debate on global warming is over, simply because I believe that the debate on no question of science can ever truly be over. We still debate Relativity, The Big Bang, and Evolution; in spite of the overwhelming evidence to some degree of truth in each. 


That is the job of science; to constantly question the established views, to debate the facts and their interpretations, and to reject any theory which does not explain all of the facts as we currently know them. Global Warming appears to be the scientific exception to the rule, with such debate squelched hardly before being uttered. 


In fact, I believe that there has been no such treatment of a scientific questioning since the Catholic Church's aggressive suppression of the growing body of knowledge of astronomy in the 1600's. (Though perhaps a Church of Global Warming was founded while I wasn't looking.) 


So how now do we view man-caused global warming? Is it fact? One can hardly say so when those who believe in it are forced to cook the data. Is it a failed theory? Perhaps, but there is much information yet to be revealed and who knows how real scientific debate will interpret them once they are. At the very least however, I think that we can safely say now that the debate is far from over, and that any action taken on the basis of the current "published understanding of the facts" may be premature. I think that we can also say that the current defense of the theory by the CRU is little more than a Conspiracy Conspiracy.