Dear global warming fanatics,
Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Climagate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever.
I know this is difficult for you to accept. Things seemed to be going well. You’ve got the cap-and-trade bill lurking over the United States, ready to shatter an already weakened economy plagued with unemployment problems, and effectively end America’s role as a dominant industrial power. Your beliefs have been instituted in public schools as the official state religion, whose rituals and incantations are forced upon millions of school children. The wealthy royalty of popular culture is pleased to produce an endless string of movies, music, and television programming to market your beliefs. Your critics were marginalized to the point where the presidential candidate from the 2000 Democrat ticket felt comfortable referring to them as Nazis.
I can see how losing all of this cultural and political power in a few short weeks would be stunning. I hope the shock has dissipated enough for you to understand where we are now, and where we are going from here.
You aren’t going to frighten the world into reducing the human population. You’re not going to succeed in terrorizing free people into embracing totalitarianism, to fend off a phantasmal catastrophe that no democratic nation has the discipline to combat. We’re not going to politely ignore swarms of private jets and limos ferrying you to carbon-belching “climate summits,” where you draw up plans for the Western proletariat to live as primitive hunter-gatherers. We’re not going to let a pampered elitist, who once flew around the world to attend cricket practice, tell us that we need to make do without air travel and ice water.
We’ll never be foolish enough to allow a band of fanatics to use “peer review” to rule all dissenting opinion out-of-bounds, then declare themselves the proud owners of a mighty consensus. You global-warming fanatics underestimate how much you needed those tactics to gain power. You’ll never have that kind of unchallenged authority again, because we will never stop demanding the raw data, and we’ll drown you in laughter when you mutter something about deleting it by accident. We will never forget that you began with a conclusion and sought to harvest data that supported it – the exact opposite of the scientific method.
Your arrogant condescension to your critics is horribly misplaced. You have completely lost the ability to call anyone “stupid.” Your capacity for reason is the matter in question. Your status as “scientists” is on probation. It will take years of faithful adherence to the scientific method, and rigorous efforts to test and disprove your hypotheses, before you can regain the trust of thoughtful men and women. Until you have accomplished this, the attitude we expect from you is humility and contrition. You have much to answer for. The time for you to issue pompous lectures is over. The time for you to give sworn testimony may soon begin. We’re a year away from the American voter’s first opportunity to respond to the politicians who terrorized them by waving a loaded cap-and-trade bill in their faces.
We ask you to stop propagandizing our children, because it won’t work any more. We will prepare them to deal with you. Informed parents across the industrialized world will explain what Climagate means to their children, and prepare them with questions your public-education minions cannot answer. The vindicated critics you’ve been working to silence will fill the post-Climagate void with publications, and some of them will become best-sellers. You’ll always have your political allies and fellow travelers, but you’ll never have a population ignorant of climate science to push around again.
You can stop trying to make Climagate go away by ignoring it, or lying about it. That won’t work, either. Huge stories can no longer be suppressed by a handful of like-minded network executives and editors. Those glittering eyes you see in the darkness, beyond the comforting glow of the New York Times editorial board, are the massed ranks of the Internet’s Army of Davids. They are a feral mixture of blogging curiosity and search-engine memory. If you think they’re closing in around you… well, it’s not just your imagination.
One of the worst sins you must answer for is the damage you have done to real science. We have much to learn about the Earth, its ecology, and its climate. We will not enhance our ability to learn those secrets by impoverishing ourselves in fit of primitive superstition and political opportunism. Desperate people don’t do a good job of protecting the environment… it is a job suitable only to vibrant nations of industry and technology. Those of us who still cherish independent thought, and the spirit of scientific inquiry, would like to resume our studies of the universe. It’s difficult to hear the truth whispered in the tides, the breeze, and the solar wind over the hysterical jabbering of fanatics, and the angry demands of greedy politicians.
