A hoax of a hoax is a hoax
A couple of weeks ago I was at Borders and I noticed a provocative cover of the Newsweek magazine, declaring that the Global Warming was a hoax. My first thought was oh, Newsweek of all places is actually going to take a long hard look at the data and come up with an alternative viewpoint that flies in the face of all the conventional wisdom. Then I noticed an asterisk. The fine print on the same magazine cover was basically saying "Just kidding, the hoax part is what a well-funded anti global warming machine would want you to believe." I wanted to read a bit more, so I opened up the magazine and took a look at the article. The article starts with a story of Barbara Boxer, and her rude realization that the evil anti-global warming machine is not swayed by the hard scientific proofs. I decided not to read any further. Any article that uses Barbara Boxer as a model of sensible, centrist impassioned thinking seriously undermines the credibility of its findings.
The discussion of merits, or the lack thereof, of scientific case for global warming and its purported human origin would take us too far afield. My biggest contention in the case of Newsweek article is that they are trying to contrast the supposedly high-minded, objective scientists who work only in order to further our knowledge, putting their own personal interests aside, and a supposedly greedy, corporate types who will stop at nothing in order to further their nefarious agendas. In practice, things are much more complicated than that. Science has become a cut-throat competitive arena where untold numbers of highly qualified individuals are competing for a very limited number of highly lucrative grants. It is a zero-sum game with wide gaps between winners and losers. Most of the money worldwide comes from government agencies with vested interest in political agendas. It is highly doubtful that those political considerations are not on the minds of both granting agencies and recipients of grants. This was more than obvious during the Cold War when largest grants went to strategically important military research.
Furthermore, once a lab or an agency is awarded a grant, it will try to keep it and renew it indefinitely. There is no full-proof method of keeping the grant, but a fairly certain way of losing it is to report that the effect you studied does not really exist. The pressure is overwhelming to show that the reason for the grant's original award is real. If you spend several years doing research trying to prove that there is life on Mars, you are not likely to say that there is definitely no such thing. You and your coworkers will be left without funding for several years, maybe longer. The worst that is usually reported is that "findings are inconclusive and further research is needed." Many academic careers are completely based and sustained on "further research needed bases".
So what is the point of all of this? Yes Newsweek is right there is a well-funded machine involved in the global warming debate. But this well-funded machine is nothing else but the scientific community itself. Global warming may or may not be happening, but it is in the vital interest of this machine that it in fact is happening. Compared to the scientific community, all other "well funded machines" are nothing but toy trucks.