Skeptical of the skeptics

My google alert on climate change in Canada has been faithfully telling me now for several days about an emerging global consensus that climate change is all a hoax. It’s all over the papers, apparently: all the scientists at the Heartland conference on climate change would like to assure the global public that there is no need for alarm and we can go on burning fossil fuels indefinitely (or at least until we run out–separate problem).

There’s only one little problem: they’re wrong. Rather than reproduce the already-existing and excellent pieces of investigative journalism into this conference, I’ll merely point you to DeSmogBlog (start with this post on the Heartland Institute’s storied past as a mouthpiece for the tobacco industry) and Island of Doubt, the latter of which recently stated:

Here’s the thing: If Will [conservative American columnist known largely for getting climate science embarassingly wrong and refusing to apologize] is right, and there is no global warming, then much of what we think we know about chemistry and biology and ecology and thermodynamics and geology and physics is wrong. If Will is right, then thousands of climatologists are not only wrong, but participating in a global conspiracy to conceal the truth about the state of the planet’s ecosystem. The climatologists have nothing to gain from perpetuating the “lie” of anthropogenic global warming, but they’re doing it anyway, just to be mean.

Amen.