New Climate Change Email Fraud

It is . . . interesting . . . to discover that the world is filled with so many people eager to provide a smoke screen - often without pay - for those who are willing to profit from the destruction of lives and property on a massive scale.

This actually amazes me each time I see it - that such a large community of blatantly vile creatures should exist.

This disgust is directed at climate change deniers who are now using a new set of leaked emails to create another smoke cloud behind which millionaires can continue to profit from activities threatening the large scale destruction of lives and property of those who have very little to begin with.

Here is one of the quotes from those emails.

[T]he trick may be to decide on the main message and to use that to guid[e] what gets included and what gets left out.

Clearly, this is definitely proof of a sinister plot. First one decides on the conclusion one wants to peddle. Then, one cherry-picks the relevant data with an eye to including that which supports the conclusion and leaving out that which does not.

Right?

Actually, this quote comes from an email from Jonathan Overpeck to Ricardo Villalba on how to create a half-page summary of an article. Obviously, you can't create a summary by including everything in the article. You have to decide on the main message of the article (ignoring tangents and lesser concerns) and use that to determine what information to include in the summary.

Furthermore, the very next line in that email reads:

For the IPCC, we need to know what is relevant and useful for assessing recent and future climate change. Moreover, we have to have solid data - not inconclusive information.

Here is another of the quotes:

We really don't want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written . . . We'll have to cut out some of his stuff.

What is this bullshit that Michael (Schulz) had written that needs to be cut out? The context of the email tells us that Michael had was glossing over of the uncertainties and complexities in the climate science and thus presenting conclusions as being more solid than the evidence (others argued) was warranted. He was hiding the fact that some of the science was messy.

If the creatures who lifted this quote had included the next sentence in that email.

What we want is good honest stuff, warts and all, dubious dating, interpretation marginally better, etc.

There is no way that those who lifted the quoted material could have missed the sentences that followed. But those sentences gave the quotes a context that made the emails less useful, so the creatures who did this work left those sentences behind.

They then offered this material to an army of lackeys who they knew would care nothing about the truth of the matter and who would simply parrot the information provided, adding their own condemnation to the sinister scientists and government agents who were obviously conspiring to perpetrate a hoax for the purpose of gaining money. They pretend that they view this type of behavior as worthy of condemnation, yet they are engaged in the very type of behavior they are pretending to condemn.

The final result - the end that provides the initial motivation behind these activities - will be that harvesting of profits that will generate death and destruction people might have otherwise avoided can continue.

Make no mistake, these people would prefer to see you or your children or grandchildren dead over giving up a dime of profit or of putting an iota of effort into discovering what is true or false about the issue of climate change. You cannot explain the type of behavior we are observing here any other way.

When I see behavior such as this, I understand the interest in an afterlife in which these types of creatures get the treatment they deserve from a divine source of cosmic justice. There is some pleasure in the thought of them being made to suffer in proportion to the harms that their immoral behavior created for others. It would also be nice if this cosmic justice would give the victims of this behavior an after-life that had a quality that was denied to them on earth but creatures such as this.

However, cosmic justice does not exist.

And I wonder, at times, if a belief in cosmic justice in an imagined afterlife makes some of us morally lazy in this life. If one thinks that a divine justice will take care of these matters in the long run, does that make it easy to shrug off those injustices in the real world? Does it make it easier for villains to profit in this world? I hasten to add that the right to freedom of speech forbids one from responding to words with violence. But we can still make it clear to the world what types of creatures we are dealing with here - and we can still put effort into limiting the success of those who would kill, maim, and destroy for profit in this world.

You can find out more information on these emails at ThinkProgress The Climate Scientists Who Wrote the Hacked Emails Explain the Cherry-Picked Phrases