Right... it is another hippie conspiracy!
Oxymoron
. Most hippies I've known couldn't get a sandwich together, let alone a conspiracy. And they mostly smoke like chimneys.
Confirmation of that comes when you scratch the surface of a denialist. When you corner them and get them to answer why there is supposedly a worldwide conspiracy of climate scientists "lying" about the data, their answer very often boils down to "they're all a bunch of goddamned Commies trying to destroy the free market!" In their eyes if something interferes with corporate profits and the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, it cannot be anything except an evil conspiracy. It just CAN'T be true, because all "true" things support the "free market"...
I just made a post on the Polar Bear thread touching on history (as a discipline). History is actually my main interest, and it gets just the same sort of treatment from ideologues (left and right) as science does. It has to be battered into the shape they need, to fit the boxes they live in. If the evidence says different, the evidence must be rigged, or it's irrelevant because of this other thing over here, the tropical tropo-whatsit thingy, what about that, eh? And where's the Soviet Union now? Ergo ... some crap or other.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes" (Mark Twain). That can't be quoted too often. (Mark Twain is my hero
.) That's why I'm quite confident that no effective
global action will be taken on AGW. For the upcoming Copenhagen Conference, 2009, see the Congress of Vienna, 2015 (the Congress to End All European Wars). As AGW bites there will be local, national, and regional responses, in that order.
Another thing that the likes of mhaze don't twig is that the impact will be fractal. Some continents will be hit harder than others, within each continent some countries will be hit harder, ultimately down to each society, and even within each social class. The folk with a dozen homes across four continents will fare much better than most, but even some of them will get screwed. Check out what happened to the Romanovs. Were I an Al Saud I would take serious note
. "Don't go down to the cellar ..."
mhaze and his ilk will not fare well but will probably go down blaming it all on Hansen, as their free-market heroes jet off to their high-ground gated communities. Remember how Bush
Minor could feel the pain of Katrina because a friend of his lost
one of his homes?
Tobacco and health : where's the downside if you're selling it, not smoking it? Peak Oil : where's the downside if you're selling it, not buying it? AGW : where's the downside when you live in a controlled environment anyway? Have your people deny it; they know how to work dupes, such as mhaze and Steve McIntyre. It doesn't even cost much to set them off like Duracell bunnies.
In the meantime, of course, you have your people scope out the
reality and position yourself accordingly. It's not (as Lucifage Rocifale assumes) a conspiracy, it's individuals acting in their own best interests as they see them. The same kind of individuals will see their own best interests in pretty much the same way. There's no co-ordination, and no need for it. The Bush
Minor Administration is an emergent phaenomenon, not a crafted one.
