Conspiracy theorists have deservedly had a bad press. They range from the plain silly to the frankly incredible and stray into the realms of deranged. They include some of the wackiest individuals on the planet, ranging from people like David Icke, a suitable case for treatment who believes world governments have been taken over by alien lizards, to born-again religionistas awaiting the rapture and convinced satan is behind everything nasty. Confused? You will be!
You only have to spend some time on the internet to encounter these confused people, and it can be entertaining and amusing to read the rambling incoherence of their inadequate minds; 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government they would have you believe, or it was Mossad, others claim, to besmirch the name of Muslims [as if they hadn't already done a good enough job of that themselves]. Practically any issue or newsworthy event will have a conspiracy theory attached, it's almost as if, for some, reality just isn't satisfying enough, they have to embroider everything with a secret conspiracy.
We're superior
What do they get out of it? Well, firstly, it makes them, as clearsighted individuals who have seen through the web of government lies and found the truth, so much more important and interesting. They become, in their eyes, more powerful, more intelligent, more aware than the best brains, it boosts their ego immeasurably, and I suspect a weak ego is at the root of much of the theories and individuals who embrace them.
Or insane?
Of course some are actually insane, and before the internet would have spent their little lives in obscurity, mumbling to themselves on street corners, or even haranging passers by who gave them a wide birth as scary. Sometimes they would get treatment, and as long as they kept taking the medication they would be relatively normal and capable even of holding down a job. Some ended up in asylums where their confused brains would be sedated daily and they would vegetate. Now with care in the community being the latest way of dealing with mental illness, and with the internet there for all, they now have a website and others with a tenuous grip on reality get sucked into their deranged imagination, respond to it and thus encourage it; together they form a little band that is convinced the conspiracy is real and ongoing, they help each other to get worse!
Now for the big one!
But all these petty conspiracies pall into nothing compared to the great global warming conspiracy theory. This is the big one and can be compared to religions as a brain virus that has captured many more than usual, thus creating such a noise that the media have taken notice, and the sheer noise of it has attracted ever more followers to its anti-science posture, without once applying logical critique to it.
Just because you believe all governments are out to get us DOES make you a paranoiac
To believe your own government is capable of lying and dissembling is one thing, and as governments and politicians are never totally honest and often do try to fool the electorate and get away with mistakes, wrong decisions and corruption, it's understandable that some would make the jump and think them capable of much worse. But to believe that not just their government, but all governments of all persuasions and political colours are conspiring together, along with tens of thousands of highly-trained scientists across a range of disciplies to fool everyone into believing that the climate is changing as a result of the emmissions of carbon we have been broadcasting into the atmosphere for over two hundred years, takes conspiracy theory into the realms of clinical paranoia as some psychiatrists have pointed out.
Science or fantasy?
People without a shred of scientific training or knowledge who would never doubt the world is round and goes round the sun or that internal combustion engines work, now think science is out to fool them. Understandable if you're part of the deranged band of happy clappy evolution deniers who are already at loggerheads with modern science and would have been happier way back when superstition and faith were all there was [which is where they get their creationist nonsense from], they happily claim that the world has only been around for 4,000 years, and deny that carbon dating is possible since it dates the Earth to 4.4 billion years old - quite a disparity! They are already anti-science and lost in fantasy. But most people in developed countries where education exists know better, and generally trust science and scientists, who have discovered many things and contributed hugely to our knowledge and to the modern world.
Did Moses know?
Without even understanding the words, these modern day flatearthers copy and paste snippets from denialist websites as arguments against man-made global warming, ignoring the logical assumption that if you dig up and burn the accumulated carbon stored away as 'fossil fuels' in the Earth's crust over millions of years of plant growth in the space of two hundred years, you stand a good chance of changing the climate. If you don't believe in fossils, of course, you presumably think 'god' put all the coal, oil and gas there for us to drive cars and power stations, which makes a logical person wonder why it took us so long to realise this and take advantage of god's gift; how come he didn't let Moses know about it, then the industrial revolution could have got off to a head start.
Who funds it?
And the denialist websites are reportedly being funded by Saudi oil money, despite even oil companies taking this conspiracy seriously. The Saudis, simple desert nomads with a toxic faith who struck it rich big time, really don't want their wealth river to stop, they'll do anything to keep the world in ignorance and still consuming their product.
Blame it on the hippies
I suspect that at the root of the denial by some is the fact that they see environmentalism and thus global warming 'conspiracy' to be the creation of hippies, and rather than ever admit that the hippies (for all their illogic at times) got it right about the environment. The hippies morphed into the environment movement, scientists became involved investigating aspects of environmental degradation and searching for solutions to problems, and the gathering evidence of climate change [you'd have to be truly insane to deny it's happening] started to convince more and more until scientific research was funded and data amassed.
The data is all in
Now the data is in, has been evaluated and the conclusion is universally accepted in the worlds of science and government; it's real, it's going to get a lot worse, and it's our fault. The simple-minded will still cling to 'CO2 is good for plant growth therefore plants will just get bigger and we'll have more food' and other such inane unscientific nonsense, and will still deny it's happening even when up to their necks in floodwater.
It's the poor wot gets the pain [first]
Already, poor, low-lying countries are beginning to suffer, glaciers are melting around the world along with ice sheets at the poles and even permafrost [locked away for millions of years] is melting. Floods are a growing problem and in other parts drought is causing massive losses of land fit for growing food, and people as well as animals are starving. This naturally affects the world's poor first, and substantially more than the rich nations, which is why in third world countries you won't hear too many deniers, while in the rich, complacent countries with their overindulged citizens and flagrant waste of resources, the selfish deniers are most evident - despite which they are still a tiny minority.
Warmest on record
The last decade was the warmest on record, yet the deniers still claim that the Earth is cooling, and prat on about an ice age having been forecast by the very same scientists a decade ago - it wasn't, the media got excited by a few scientists running through some theories based on the perceived regularity of ice ages, and the tabloids, comics for the hard of thinking, went for a big splash to sell papers.
The internet stores everything for the future
And what these people don't seem to realise is that as things get worse, as they inevitably will, the culpability of those who not only do nothing but actively argue that nothing needs to be done, will stand out more and more as the enemies of the planet and future generations. All their words, scribbled down on the internet across the world are recorded and archived for as long as the net survives, and their words will one day come back to haunt them. They could be held accountable by the younger generation of stealing their lives, of spending their inheritance. They could even face the wrath of society with new laws making denial a criminal offence and past offenders hunted down.
Count me out
I shan't be around then, I'm not arguing this for me as my life will soon be over, I am fully aware though that my children are going to suffer towards the end of their lives, and my grandchildren will bear the full brunt of a collapsing ecosystem unable to sustain the level of human life that it currently barely sustains, and those believers in the techno fix - 'humans will think of some way to put it right in the future' - are living with false hopes.
There is no counter argument, just denial
Those who deny have yet to come up with a cogent argument. The first thing they need to answer is why. Why would all these people conspire together [even if it were possible] to hoodwink humanity? Governments tax us already, and have no need to invent excuses to tax us more, so that argument is lame and dead in its tracks to start with. In all my dealings with the denialists, none have ever been able to mount any kind of argument, and most don't even try, preferring to just copy and paste bits and pieces from around the net in the hope it amounts to something; it doesn't.
The evidence is here
Some, trying to appear more rational than the out and out loonies of the conspiracy theory cult, claim to be merely sceptical, and claim to welcome hard evidence, yet they discount all evidence. This site http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php has plenty of evidence, and is hated by the hard core deniers since it answers cogently and succinctly all the claims and slurs, innuendo and blatant lies offered by these [Saudi funded?] websites. If anyone is truly sceptical and searching for the truth they should go there and read everything they can and try hard to understand what it's saying. They wouldn't understand the data amassed over decades by scientists in the field measuring such diverse physical manifestations as dying coral, species movement north, and ice sheet melt, as you have to train for years to learn science to that level, and dry data is pretty meaningless unless interpreted by someone who has at least a doctorate in his or her discipline. Non scientists should have respect for the professionalism of these people whose life's work has been devoted to seeking truth for the benefit of all of us. They shouldn't have to be putting up with constant harrassment by the ignorant and superstitious, or the just plain selfish.
