CLIMATEGATE 2 – YES, THEY’VE BEEN LYING TO YOU

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You’re appalled, you’re outraged, you’re stunned and you’re angry about the whole climategate emails thing.

And now you’re most likely out here in the blogosphere because the mainstream media in the country you live in is either not mentioning them at all or have relegated it to a small-print footnote at the bottom of page ninety-nine, with a blatant propaganda spin that would be an egregious insult to the intelligence of a retarded chimp with other things on its mind.

Yes, the emails are genuine. Yes, they were making it up all along. Yes, you believed them. Yes, they betrayed your trust. Yes, they betrayed science. Yes, they betrayed their own integrity. Yes, there is a news blackout on it. Yes, yes and yes again. Yes to the whole damn lot.

Welcome to the resistance, the underground, the outcasts, the Maquis, the holdouts, the last best hope, Fort Apache. Welcome to the fellowship of the skeptics, you’ll find we don’t have horns and pointy tails and all those dreadful stories about us chasing our thirteen year old inbred first cousins are not all true. Em, that last bit didn’t come out quite right but you know what I mean; let’s just move along.

I know exactly how you’re feeling because like nearly all the sceptics, I used to be more than sympathetic to the environmental cause myself. In my own case, I was a committed environmentalist back in the days when that meant simply not trashing nature. It wasn’t me that changed, it was that environmentalism mutated into a green monster. We all had our dreadful moment of realisation somewhere on that road to the green Damascus and slowly became skeptics and will therefore burn in green hellfire.

Green fires are carbon neutral, by the way. They simply have to be because they’re green, so Greenpeace are funding a few scientists to prove it’s true. They’ll peer review it amongst themselves and pass it on to the IPCC, where their mates will make sure it gets into the next report. Their mates work for the WWF so there won’t be any problems there. Wink, wink, nod, nod. While they’re busy thinking about exactly how to do that research, you might as well have the press handout of the results so far. They’re very promising and they’ll make a good article for you.  No need to wait for them to get the right result because we already know what the right result has to be so they’ll come up with the right result. Right? That’s called post-normal science, the new and improved version of the old fuddy duddy normal science.

That’s the sort of science those guys are discussing in the emails.

If they sound like a gang of school bullies, it’s because in a sense, that’s precisely what they are like, with climate science being the school yard. The more you read the emails, the more you recognise the usual types. The macho leaders of the pack, the sycophants, the mad dogs, the groupies, the wannabees on the edges and the weak ones who’ve decided it’s safer to be inside the gang than outside it. They’re all there, every single one of them.

You got Big Dawg for starters. He doesn’t take any “bullshit and optimistic stuff” from anyone. They used to call him the vulture at school because he’d got that funny way of sitting at his desk but nowadays, he’s a real tough guy. He never declines to give any jerks he doesn’t like a bloody good hiding. He’s pretty good with doing the same thing with data but that pales into insignificance compared to the gelding he can do to an email archive. One hard glance from him and the scrotums of every email server in a twenty-five mile radius shrivel.

Speaking of hiding, there’s Manny the Magician, who disappeared a whole frigging medieval warming period and still found time to prod some churnalists with his hockey stick to dig the dirt on Stevie “the swot” McIntyre, just because he was so much better at sums than Manny was.

You got the wannabe on the fringe, whingeing because he knows “the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group”. He should “beat the crap” out of that scrawny little skeptic kid over there, trying to look inconspicuous in a corner of the playground. That’d move him up a few notches in the pecking order.

All jokes aside, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s probably a duck. From the viewpoint of the scrawny little skeptic kid, read skeptic climate scientist who’s just had a working over by them, they are just a bunch of thugs.

The question is; what’s next for you?

You’ve come this far, so about now you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do from here on out. Like in the Matrix movie, you’ve got the choice between two pills; the blue pill or the red pill. Take the blue pill and keep on dreaming the green global warming dream like you’ve been doing for so long or go for the red and take a walk on the skeptic wild side. If you decide to pop the red, I’ll tell you exactly what you’ve got coming at you because in all fairness, you deserve to know what that decision will mean.

You might as well have the bad news first, so suck it in Buster, pucker that butt and grit your teeth because I’m going to give it to you right between the eyes.

You’ll become a denier, which the “educated” ones among them will carefully explain to you, just means you deny stuff but all the grownups in the room know it really means you’ve just dropped down the morality ladder to the level of a holocaust denier, which you’re being likened to. The not so educated ones usually stick to simpler names like climate criminal because the alliteration makes it easier for them to remember it.

No matter what your actual politics are, you’ll immediately become an Aryan Nation CommoNazi gun-totin’ redneck retard who blames the “guvvermint” for everything and knows it’s all a conspiracy by the New World Order to prise your trusty old Remington double o from your cold dead hands.

You’ll also automatically become a paid flunky of Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Coal or whatever Big is required to misrepresent whatever you’re saying as just shilling for the Big whatever. The wages are distinctly modest by the way; that’s to say, not a cent, a sou, a nickel or a dime. There’s not a penny in it but that doesn’t matter, you’re still going to be a paid lackey. A minor break is you don’t have to declare it as income on your tax return.

Whatever judgement, education, insight or learning you were fortunate enough to accumulate in your life will be as naught as you’ve just become an unthinking anti-science knuckle dragger. That applies even more if you do happen to have a knowledge of science.

It gets tougher I’m afraid. Your own particular mainstream media in the shape of ABC, CBC, NBC, BBC and all the other Cs, will not only make sure you never get on the air but also make sure your viewpoint will never be represented there, never mind represented fairly. Pretty much, the same goes for all the big newspapers and journals. If your views aren’t welcome to them, then you can imagine what chance your comments stand on any of their content. They’ll get censored to hell or you’ll just get banned outright. Pretty soon, you’ll learn to think of such routine events as yourself earning yet another Purple Heart. It doesn’t matter because after a while, you’ll even stop trying to comment anyway.

It goes a bit further than that though. Not only can they black you out but they can also black out news about inconvenient things like Climategate 2, which is a hitherto unknown ability I suspect a lot of new visitors to this site have only just found out about. If they don’t report on it, it therefore doesn’t exist.

You’ll become some sort of weirdo who’s spending a little too much time on your computer. To be fair, there’s some truth in this particular slur because as time passes, you’ll come to realise independent journalism has pretty much died in the mainstream media. If you want all the news, the blogosphere is the only place you’ll get it, irrespective of whom it’s inconvenient to.

The bottom line is that since you’ve come to have a doubt in the Church of Climatology, you’ll be excommunicated and marginalised to all of the above stereotypes, because that’s the sort of dehumanising labelling all fundamentally intolerant movements do to any who would presume to question them. It all gets very personal, very fast, so you better not be a sensitive type.

There, you have been warned.

The good news is; you’ll be joining a community made up of people who’ve mostly been through the meat grinder I described above. They’ve seen the Elephant.

It’s made up of individuals who do ask the awkward questions and won’t give up until they get to an answer that makes sense to them, irrespective of where that’s going to take them. It came into being because there simply weren’t any forums anywhere else to try to get some answers to the questions or at least raise an honest doubt. It’s made up of blogs like this one and despite our paid lackey status, they’re all free and nobody is making a red cent out of them. Every man and woman is a volunteer, prepared to give up their free time for something they think of as worthwhile and every one has their own particular motivation for doing so. On balance, you’ll always be more likely to get an honest answer from someone who’s not being paid to come up with an answer but that may just be my quirky opinion.

They’re diverse, each with their own flavour. Some do the science, some do the news, some do the politics, some do the mix and some quite frankly are just doing the funky chicken. The quality varies from the barking mad sub-literate raving maniacs to some blogs where you’d better have your deep thinking cap on as well as your favourite pair of running shoes, just to keep in touching distance of some of the conversations. On a good blog, you’ll learn as much from the comments as you’ll learn from the topics they’re posted on. I do. You’ll soon sort the wheat from the chaff and find your regular haunts; I hope here will be one of them.

The best thing is, I’d have to say, we skeptics are the sort of people who like a beer and a laugh and probably throw much better parties than the alarmists.

Well, I hope I’ve helped you make your mind up. So which is it going to be, blue pill or red pill?

While you’re thinking it over, I’m going to pop out for a moment. Just spotted a cousin o’ mine and I don’t want to give her too much of a head start. She’s one of the speedy ones.