Really researching? Or just pretending?

As the Copenhagen climate-change conference kicks off, there are the usual protests that it's all a big sham.

Here's one of the things I always wonder when listening to people who insist that anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming (AGW) is all a conspiracy.

Why are the scientists willing to play along?

For the sake of argument, I'll accept that there are politicians and other people who could conceivably have some kind of motive for faking something that gets them more power/money/etc. (Look at the relationship between the Republican Party and the working class, or between the Democratic Party and gay people, for example.)

But to accept that AGW is fake, you also have to believe that thousands of scientists around the world are playing along, juking their data and faking their experiments just to further the conspiracy.

There are several reasons why I have trouble believing this. Here's the biggest one: the blood lust of scientists. If you've ever sat in on a lab meeting, you've seen the vigor and even glee with which scientists attack the slightest weakness in each others' data and experimental designs. There is a lot of science-career hay to be made from finding problems in other peoples' work, so an AGW conspiracy would require the willing collusion of whole departments, not just individuals working in isolation.

Then there's the fame and riches that would come to anyone who could conclusively overturn the current consensus that AGW is real. Again, I can accept for the sake of argument that the venal politicians I posited earlier might be able to get some scientists to go along with them in their fakery.

But I find it hard to accept that, in all the labs where this fakery is going on, there isn't one single scientist willing to blow the whistle and share his copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Climate Change with the media. If nothing else, at one fell swoop he could clean out all of the faculty members clogging up the tenure track ahead of him, not to mention that his book would be a definite best-seller. Heck, he might even end up as the Time Man of the Year.

As for all those scientists who would have to be playing along, do you really believe that the following sounds like a believable scenario, repeated thousands of times over?

• A young person becomes interested in science and forms the ambition to spend his life in the pursuit of knowledge.
• He spends lonely, exhausting student years in labs and at field sites, sacrificing a social life and vacations at home in favor of diligently working to perfect his methods and skills.
• Fresh out of school, he joins the research faculty of a prestigious university or foundation and begins the life's work he has always dreamed of.
• Then his supervisor takes him aside, administers an oath of secrecy, and informs him that it's all been a waste of time. "In this field," his supervisor informs him, "we don't actually do science, we just fill orders for faked data from a shadowy international cabal bent on laying the groundwork for a world government and creating a framework to transfer the wealth of the first world to the third world."
• The young scientist thinks about it for a minute, then shrugs and agrees to go along with it. If he decides not to go along and changes careers, he still considers himself bound until death by that secrecy oath he swore with his hand on the departmental copy machine.

Anyway, I see I have a kindred spirit in Megan at From The Archives (via Ezra Klein), who wonders—to paraphrase Ezra—"what's in it for the oyster guy?"

"How do people who deny climate change reconcile [their belief] with guys like this, who are spending entire careers on teasing out really non-dramatic aspects of climate change? This guy is not measuring carbon concentrations in oyster shells for the glory. There are thousands of these people, dorkily and steadily piecing out the causes and predicting effects.

"If it is all a conspiracy and nothing is happening, how do denialists conceive of these guys? Do they think these monotonous nerds who talk in jargon ... are making it up to promote the conspiracy? Like, they spend the morning thinking up esoteric ways of measuring wave energy by sand lost at different gauges around the state, and the afternoon faking their data so they can please Al Gore? They've done this now for ten years and they plan to make an entire career out of making up the detailed groundwork for fake climate change? All of them? On nothing? Imagine the secret conferences they must hold to synchronize their stories and settle on an allowable variance between the made-up river data, the made-up precipitation data and the made-up ocean data."

Imagine, indeed.

Photo by Flickr user Tim Brauhn.

Now based in Missoula, Montana after three decades on the coasts, Sutton is a freelance business writer and journalist. He writes the Missoula Notebook for the nationally-award-winning online news source New West, keeps a blog, and can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Click here for an overview of what Went West is all about.

This article is the copywritten property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media.

REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.