All of us who concerned about the future of the planet have misunderestimated the opposition from those who are not. We thought that the flooding of web sites, talk back radio, television chat shows, letters columns in newspapers, blogs, with tens of thousands of mindless repetitions of a few talking points, was the main tactic. It had been modelled, perhaps, on the dropping of aluminum foil plates ("Window") by planes heading for Calais on 6 June 1944. The foil looked like massed planes and ships to German radar, making them believe, until too late, that the invasion force was heading in that direction, and not Normandy.
The mindless denialist chatter has had the same effect, masking the real science going on and preventing public, and politicians, understanding the very real threat of climate change. And this was bad enough - a very effective tactic which has prevented any serious action on greenhouse gases for ten long desperate years. A tactic which has let the big polluters slip under the radar, continue sucking trillions of dollars out of the Earth while carelessly pouring CO2 into the air.
But we thought that was it. That soon reality would appear like the D-Day invasion fleet suddenly appearing with the dawn off Normandy. That the combination of measurements and the now obvious effects of global warming on world climates was going to bring politicians kicking and screaming to the negotiating tables of Copenhagen. If that was the worst that the shadowy figures of the energy industry and other giant corporations could throw at us then we had, like Ali, roped a dope, and were about to bounce back with the knock-out blow.
Silly us. The invasion of Iraq and then the Health Care debate should have warned us that the Armies of the Right stop at nothing these days to impose their will and maintain their robber baron status, their dynasties. And so, like WMD and "Death Panels" now we have the "CRU email scandal", discussed earlier by Kevin Grandia. Just two weeks from Copenhagen the British Climate Research Unit computers are hacked, their emails downloaded and sent off into Deniaworld. There, just as in the lead up to the Iraq War, words are cherry picked, context removed, common sense abandoned, outrage simulated, war declared, counter views demonised. Vials of imaginary anthrax are displayed, trucks become mobile laboratories, aluminum tubes become nuclear bombs, rockets are ready to launch at New York in ten minutes.
And suddenly, it seems, temperatures are no longer rising, the Arctic is no longer melting, glaciers don't retreat, droughts don't happen, record temperatures are no longer set, marine acidity doesn't increase, sea levels don't rise, plants don't flower at different times, birds don't breed at different times, firestorms no longer erupt.
It was, apparently, all just a dream.
But I'm a wake up on The Watermelon Blog.