Instead, the powers conspired to prevent this from happening, some with lofty hopes. Grassroot environmentalists hoped the scandal was all a big mistake and when the smoke cleared, it would all stand as solid as before, reinforcing their long-held belief of how the world really is. And others with not so lofty hopes. The green organizations worried that billions of dollars in donations would dry up if this scandal was not answered. Government leaders worried that their long held dream of energy taxes, redistribution of wealth and a much larger government that must administer these great programs would be set back by years. And the scientists worried that their climate research labs, all of which support the narrative, would lose funding and face downsizing and closure. The mainstream media worried that the large corporations that were so convenient to malign (because they cannot fight back the way individuals and government can), may not have been the bad guys after all. This shatters their very belief system, at a time when news organizations are being pummeled into dust by the Internet. MSNBC may have hoped that if they could only paper over the problem, parent company GE would still receive huge subsidies for wind generators, sweeping legislation would require green appliances in homes and many other financial benefits would be reamed, er raped, I mean reaped from the public. Literally, from an unsuspecting public until now.
Once the scandal broke, it seemed that nothing could save them. What the movement needed was time. Time to stop the lifeblood from spilling out of the environmental body. Time to figure out what would fix the problem. A virtual news blackout in the U.S. ensued. But they overlooked one thing (or hundreds of little things). By being predisposed to the global warming narrative, they were uncritical in the extreme to the strength of every piece of evidence in favor, at the same time feeling they had to come to it's defense and block any evidence against. As a natural result, the evidence for became weaker and the evidence against became stronger. It was a house of cards ready to fall.
The house of cards now falls in slow-motion. By delaying and understating the scandal in the mainstream media for as long as possible, they prolong the death throes of the movement for that much longer. In the long run, it is indefensible, it cannot stand. Today, a tiny minority in the USA is even aware of the scandal, you can see this for yourself by asking people outside of your circle of friends, especially young people. Yet we have a situation where cap and trade legislation is blocked, where support for the UN IPCC is evaporating, where states are fighting back against the EPA CO2 mandates, citizens are railing against shoddy work by government funded research such as at NASA and against perpetuating biased education in the schools. Public opinion polls about the belief in global warming show a declining trend.
All this without the true story of climate fraud reaching most of the people. When it does, slowly, and it surely will, because their supporters made sure the case for is based on only the thinnest verneer of scientific backing, and because this is arguably the greatest scandal in the history of science, the outrage will only grow and the verdict will be complete. In the meantime, the warmists are allowed to believe they still have a chance to recover something meaningful from their efforts as they continue unabated toward the precipice and oblivion and an eventual anonymous grave for the cause.
Warmists, your intentions were nothing but the best but your methods, and unknown to you, the improper methods by those you believed were supporting the narrative perverted all of that. The only outcome is the progressive demise and death of the movement as one percentage point at a time, the public excruciatingly slowly learns the truth. And that, ironically, is how the movement achieved some level of long-term sustainability.
The warmists methods did not kill the movement, it was the facts. Put another way, the movement would not have happened had the facts been given due regard. But since it did, we get some extremely valuable benefits:
- The eventual death of the movement and the resultant correction of the errs of its ways. The environmental movement has had some important successes in the past but have defintely ventured too far into the ether (and perhaps inhaled it),
- A deep abiding mistrust of the reliability of scientific claims that will be made in the future, ranging from health risks to asteroid impacts. While I really, really wanted to believe scientific research was objective and illuminating, it is far more valuable to believe that it sometimes will not be,
- Fresh skepticism of our mainstream media who we thought were watching the science and now we know were - and are - actively hiding it,
- Renewed wariness of our politicians, who, on some level exist to promote the growth of the political body, always at our expense.
And politics is where we will end. This is where the rubber meets the road, where government regulations and taxes incur real and major costs to taxpayers. Not just by soaking the energy producers, not just the rich but all of us as we pay more for everything they tax, regulate and restrict. And as the taxes, almost a living entity ever hungry for more, spread to more and more of the taxpayer's "environment", the burden on our pocketbooks only increases.
