I’m more than a little rushed this morning, but I have to point to Eric S. Raymond’s excellent analysis of the collapse of the Anthropomorphic Global Warming movement, calling for “The Naming and Shaming the AGW Fraudsters”:
The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:
If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud.
The segment Raymond has identified as zombies and greenshirts I’ve heard elsewhere named as watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Oh, and don’t miss his conclusion:
The key point — and the reason the AGW frauds need to be shamed and punished — is that the political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place.
That is, the zombies and green-shirts still have a powerful interest in magnifying scientific errors that suit their agendas into politicized crusades that could produce error cascades just as huge. Somewhere out there, there are now-innocent scientific research groups who could become the next decade’s version of the “team”, degenerating into fraudulent conspiracies as careerism draws them in, the political villains cheer them on to rationalize the power-grab of the week, and the Gaianists gamely but stupidly try to do the right thing.
I’m even prepared to hazard a guess where the next fraud would be ginned up from: environmental toxicology and what are called “endocrine disruptors”.
[Emphasis ESR's]
Absolutely, read the whole thing. This is one of those lens articles that brings an entire scene into focus.
update:
From the Devil’s Kitchen, an excellent explanation of the decision tree we should be using :
and the very simplified tree actually in use:
