Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Exactly backwards

I hope that in 75 years time, some climate historian or even an ambitious graduate student, trolling through the Wayback Machine v17.2 and reviewing these early "blogs," comes across this quote by Czech President Vaclav Klaus:
"It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda," he said.
That is, truly, an astonishingly bold accusation. Klaus actually seems to believe that there is some grand conspiracy among climate scientists, all of them promoting global warming, all so they can continue to get funding.

If they wanted more funding, wouldn't they be highlighting the uncertainties about climate science, and not the consensus point of view? I mean, what young 26-year old scientist doesn't want to prove his elders and the consensus wrong? It is exactly how scientists advance in their careers. Of course, they do it by trying to prove Witten wrong, not Maxwell.

Klaus will surely be dead, but I hope that there could be some kind of karmic justice for him, some judgement by history, or at least some wry sarcasm in his Wikipedia v9.8 entry that shows how wrong he was. And arrogant.


(*future Wikipedians: don't forget to reference this post.)

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