In fantastic news for neocons, newspaper columnists and the fossil fuel industry, it has been announced that global warming is a hoax.
Professor Henrique Salvados, in an interview recorded at his hospital bed just before his death, confessed that the whole thing had been a con job right from the beginning.
Professor Salvados' confession will come as a bombshell for the many soft-hearted, lily-livered, namby-pamby liberals out there who had fallen hook, line and sinker for the story.
The conspiracy started, apparently, at a side event to a meteorologists conference in the late 1970s. A group of weather-men, tired of being ridiculed for being wrong about the rain for the footy and wanting revenge on the world for those many years at school when they were being bullied as maths nerds, had a few cleansing ales and then decided to try to convince the world that it was warming up.
"I don't think we really believed it would take off", commented Professor Salvador, "after all, it was one of those ideas that only swim into sharp focus through the bottom of a beer glass and, by the morning after, it seemed like a 'gnaw your own arm off' kind of thing."
However, it did take off and the number of people involved grew from an initial six or seven to several hundred by the middle of the 1990s.
"We had no shortage of recruits; have you ever met a popular, socially well-adjusted weatherman?" said the Professor. "Keeping it secret was no big deal either because no-one listens to or believes the weatherman anyway, except other weathermen - and they were all in on the secret."
Once the meteorological community had accepted the modeling, it was time for the conspiracy to escalate into getting broader acceptance.
"It was no easy feat", said the Professor of this second phase, "getting the public on board. The first thing was that we needed some pictures, some art for the media to use."
In what is now recognized as the hardest work done by university students in history, the team responsible for the Crop Circles hoax in England were brought on board to mobilise up to 3,500 undergraduates to cause Arctic sea ice melt.
"Incredible to watch!", said Professor Salvador, "Thousands of spotty youths running around the Arctic Circle with industrial heaters, blow torches, hair driers and even cigarette lighters in some cases, making sure that the ice melt appeared worse every year. Of course it cost us something in kegs but it was worth it and there's nothing an undergraduate won't do for beer."
"It was even easier in Africa and South America. If you were willing to pay American dollars, half the population of the country would get involved and whole mountains, like Kilimanjaro, could be denuded of snow in an afternoon - just in time for Al Gore to turn up and take a few photos."
Another group from Australia was paid off to build a few basic huts in the shallow seas off places like Tuvalu.
"We just let the cash slosh around like the water and the natives were happy enough to go along with it. For a tenner and a box of Lego, you can always get an eight year old to stand ankle deep in some water, looking forlornly at a TV camera. In the end Tuvalu got some more aid money out of it and the kids got some toys so everyone was content."
Once the media had bought into the story, the conspirators had few problems ringing in other willing scientists.
"Frankly, all scientists want publicity. They got into it as wide-eyed youngsters hoping to be the person famous for building the warp-drive or discovering the cure for cancer. Then reality set in and they had to content themselves with smug smarter-than-thou articles in obscure journals and even more self-serving presentations at academic conventions. The only hope they had of even a moment's fame was to get something published in Scientific American or to be the talking head on some news program. And the only way to get those things was to be doing research in areas that the public were at least tangentially interested in. So they all got on board with Climate Change."
"Of course, there were always the David Suzuki, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox types who already had the publicity they wanted - bastards - and one or two around the place who insisted on seeing real evidence for themselves and that's where the hard work really started. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make enough fake ice-core samples and tree rings to convince that many people? We really had our work cut out for us."
"For the rest, we just kept the papers difficult to understand, full of lots of complicated mathematics and stuff like that. Many scientists don't understand half of what they pretend to and just nod along with the rest so that they don't look too stupid."
"It was going really well for a while. Ever time there was a hot day or a cyclone or something, people would say 'Well, that's climate change for you'. By the start of the 21st century, though, some of our projections were starting to look a little silly and some members of our group were starting to get nervous about how long people would continue to believe us. So we started to ease off on the temperature growth a bit - to make it all look a bit more credible. You'll see it in the graphs."
"Were we only in it out of a sense of childish revenge? Mostly, yes. We knew what would happen in the end. People would have to pay more for petrol and more for electricity and we just wanted to screw over every hard working family on the planet - stuff 'em, if they wanted to mock us then we'd get the last laugh. Of course, there were other factors. We got billions in research dollars and the like from the powerful solar-and-wind lobby. You know what they're like; they can buy anyone and anything with the money they have available to them. And finally, good old fashioned jealousy. It's all about bloody particle physics these days. Big expensive tunnels in the Alps, endless funding for ever more powerful computers and grants to pay for attractive PhD students to work in their labs for years at a time. Pricks! And no-one even understands what the hell they're on about with their quarks, and their spins and their bosuns. We wanted in. We needed something complex and really, really important - like the PPs and their 'first few seconds after the Big Bang' - so we came up with Climate Change."
The Conservative Union of Newspaper and Television Specialists put out a one line press release on hearing of the news
"Let the fun begin!"
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