The whole conspiracy theory about funding for "pro AGW" research is pretty odd. There is plenty of evidence that AGW denial has been funded by industry bodies.
AGW denial isn't research, of course, it's either propaganda or the sort of "motivated thinking" we see in Malcolm Kirkpatrick and Furcifer. The very idea that research can be pro- or anti-
anything is distinctly odd : research reveals what it reveals. Imagine the response to a grant application which contains "This research will find that [fill in subject here] is real/unreal". I doubt even Muller was so blatant when he blagged funding for BEST from the Koch Foundation.
If one then considers the possibility that a cabal of governments all are funding something that they think to be specious then it is even less easy to understand than most other conspiracy theories.
Agenda 21. I mean, WTF?!?
Governments would love AGW to not be a problem as then future funding and infrastructure decisions would be far simpler.
It's not as if politicians don't have enough to worry about, what with the economy, diplomacy, public opinion (which always has its limits) and the ever present threat of war. That's why the first response was to form a committee (the IPCC) to produce a report in the hope it would all go away in the meantime, and subsequent responses have been to call for yet more reports at ever longer intervals. What passes for action has involved tinkering at the edges and setting targets for the safely distant future.
To the anti-gumment conspiracy theorist, of course, there's no end to politicians' desire for extra workload and complexity in their lives.
For a moment, forget the West, and remember that even China, whilst industrialising rapidly with conventional thermal power generation, is
also installing a lot of renewable energy capacity. The Chinese government certainly has access to its own scientists.
Indeed. The Soviet Union's complicity in the Moon-Landing hoax is equally tricky to explain. Hence the need for conspiracies to be ever-expanding, and Agenda 21.
Any scientist who could come up with convincing evidence that AGW was not a problem would have their career made. People really make their name in science by changing the intellectual paradigm.
Yup, but they can make their names in the wider world by presenting deeply
unconvincing evidence, as is the case with Linzen, Spencer, Christie, Soon and a few other scientists we'd never have heard of without their opposition to AGW
in principle.
Unfortunately there is a lot of evidence that AGW is a problem, so scientists are not going to find non-existent evidence for a lack of a problem.
You can't buck the laws of physics for long.
Conspiracies do exist, of course (the aforementioned funding of anti-AGW propaganda through right-wing drunk-tanks being an example) but they either succeed, fail, or are exposed in the short-term -certainly less than the half-century that the AGW Conspiracy has allegedly been developing. And there are honest scientists we'd never have heard of if the propagandists hadn't promoted them as prime agents in said conspiracy. Al Gore would be vaguely remembered as the guy who couldn't beat a chimp in a run for US President. I just thought I'd make those points before Malcolm Kirkpatrick does
. He'll have to be a bit more inventive if he's going to respond at all.
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