The climate science conspiracy being proposed would require very smart and very sinister people, if for no other reason than the necessity of getting all the national science academies on board. But smart and sinister people have better ways of making money than getting Ph.D.s and postdocs and ultimately striving for tenure at the meteorology department at Penn State or East Anglia. –Michael Tobis
Big list of conspiring organizations from Daily Kos.
Obviously scientists are fiendishly clever sheep. Cheap sheep at that :-)
How would anyone ever keep a lid on a conspiracy like this? Do we really believe that thousands of thoroughly middle-class science geeks from all corners of the world could pull this off? Don’t forget the Americans. They haven’t been able to keep a secret for – well, for ever. Even the Manhattan Project was compromised. And can any sane person believe that Big Oil and Big Coal wouldn’t have bought the co-operation of just one conspirist by now who would be reaping in scads of millions just for spilling his guts on the hoax?
@ Chris
Not a bad list, but it it is worth it to keep in mind that the non-scientific names on that list should be weighted much less than the scientific names like the academies of science.
@ MoS
Not to mention that scientists in general are probably the wort people to keep a conspiracy. They so interested in understanding the natural world, that most of them (if not all of them) would publish any data they had that furthered that understanding, whether or not it supports the theory of AGW or not.
And add to that the immense fame any scientist who successfully overturns the theory would gain, and you have a system that is basically incompatible with conspiracies.
So I am left with two choices. Either such a conspiracy exists and the enter scientific edifice is corrupt, or such a conspiracy does not exist and the evidence really does point towards AGW.
Dan, agreed. That was kinda my tongue-in-cheek point.