Today, I conducted a consultation with Dr. Jadwiga Ordure-Cerveau, Ph.D., senior vice-president of the Climatological Union of Nonequilibrium Thermodynamic Skeptics, a non-profit educational scientific organization headquartered here in Washington, DC. Her problem stormed out of her mouth the moment she seated herself squarely in the chair situated directly in front of my desk.
“Collins,” she declared, “I’m here about that traitor, Richard Muller, and what to do about him!”
“Traitor?” I responded with just a hint of disbelief.
“Damn right,” she affirmed. “An untrustworthy turncoat, a two-faced defector, an ungrateful apostate, and a cowardly Quisling of the highest order, that’s what Richard Muller is!”
“But all Dr. Muller has done,” I dryly observed, “is announce his latest research results.”
“In the Wall Street Journal.” Dr. Ordure-Cerveau roared back. “And prior to peer review, too!”
“It’s never appeared,” I pointed out, “that you and the rest of the… ah, members of your organization… have ever been terribly concerned about peer reviews. In fact, quite a few of you have published your… um… research… in… uh, journals… which don’t actually practice the peer review process.”
“That’s different,” she protested. “We can’t get our work published in the big, fancy mainstream academic journals because of a massive, continuous, ongoing conspiracy in the scientific community to silence anyone who doesn’t toe Al Gore’s Liberal Socialist party line in favor of the worldwide global warming hoax!”
“Really?” I innocently asked. “You know, I must confess, I never quite understood exactly how that conspiracy is supposed to work. There are thousands of climate scientists in scores of countries, with hundreds of different funding sources, each reporting independent data sets, each conducting independent experiments, all coming up with the same conclusion…”
“Not all of them,” my guest interjected angrily, “not by a long shot!”
“Now, wait a minute,” I cautioned, “I didn’t say that those thousands of climate scientists who were all coming to the same conclusion constituted the entire, complete set of the climate scientists on the planet; of course they don’t – you and the rest of the… members of your organization… prove that isn’t the case. The ones who are convinced that global warming is a genuine phenomenon only constitute about ninety-five percent of all the climate scientists on the planet, and…”
“Ninety-one point five,” she insisted.
“Okay,” I conceded, “somewhere between nine out of ten and nineteen out of twenty, anyway. That’s a pretty large majority, though; right up there, for example, with the percentage of biologists who vouch for the veracity of the theory of evolution by natural selection.”
“Another pack of lies,” she sniffed, “backed up by another liberal conspiracy!”
“Oh,” I confessed, “I wasn’t aware that you are also a Creationist. I suppose that only having to consider the last six thousand years of climate data makes it much easier to substantiate your views on global warming – or perhaps I should say, the lack thereof.”
“If the climate change and evolution co-conspirators,” she spat, “want to waste their time thinking about fantasies that never happened, like ice ages and dinosaurs, well, that’s their problem. I’ve got a doctorate in Biblical Science from Bob Jones University, and all they’ve got is one-way tickets to Hell!”
“Indeed,” I remarked, “it certainly sounds like you have plenty of ire worked up for Dr. Muller, now that you perceive him to have joined your enemies.”
“Nothing he doesn’t deserve,” she assured me. “He said he was a climate change skeptic, and then he betrayed us.”
“Saying he was skeptical,” I suggested, “didn’t mean he believed that global warming isn’t true. It just meant that he wasn’t convinced. I gather that his latest study, which analyzed and compared land-based temperature data from a wide range of sources, using over 1.6 billion temperature records from more than 39,000 temperature-reporting stations worldwide, going all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century, concluded that those data unambiguously indicate a 1.6 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.89 degree Celsius increase in land temperature since the 1950’s…”
“And nothing,” she angrily interrupted, “about ocean temperature changes during the same time interval!”
“True,” I allowed, “but the… ah… skeptics’… objections to the original conclusions concentrated on anomalies in the land-based measurements, such as a bias of temperature reading locations toward thermal islands in urban centers, and systematic errors in land-based temperature measurement devices. Investigation of those issues was, as I recall, the objective of Dr. Mueller’s research in this particular study.”
“Ignoring,” she persisted, “a temperature plateau that has endured for nearly a decade!”
“Which disappears,” I countered, “when the data are analyzed using moving averages and Fourier transforms.”
“But which sticks out like a sore thumb it you don’t,” she shot back.
“All of which,” I assured her, “is going to be discussed in detail at the climate conference that started today in Santa Fe, a conference which Dr. Muller is attending, even as we speak.”
“Listen to me, buster,” she warned, “you don’t take $150,000 for climate research from the Koch Charitable Foundation and come up with results that say anything is getting warmer! Not if you know what’s good for you!”
“I believe,” I parried, “that the Koch Foundation has stated they intend to continue funding Dr. Muller’s work. As a matter of fact, they said they are ‘proud to support this strong, transparent research.’ That hardly sounds dire to me.”
“Of course,” she shouted back, “what the [expletive] are they supposed to say, ‘that [expletive] [expletive] piece of [expletive] [expletive] us over and now he’s going to [expletive] pay for what he [expletive] did,’ maybe?”
“No,” I acknowledged, “they probably wouldn’t say that – even if they were thinking it – which, now that I consider it, seems pretty likely.”
“No,” she agreed, “no [expletive] way would they say it. But I would – and, as a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here. I want some ideas about what we can do about that [expletive] [expletive] Dr. Richard A. [expletive] Muller!”
“Sounds like this means quite a bit to you,” I opined.
“[Expletive] right, it does!” Dr. Ordure-Cerveau confirmed. “I have a one-point-two million dollar corner lot house on Capitol Hill, a five-hundred thousand dollar beach house in Hilton Head, a four-hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar ski chalet in Vail, a three-hundred and seventy-thousand dollar Jaguar, a two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollar limited edition Humvee, a one-hundred fifty-nine thousand dollar custom Cadillac Escalade; memberships in three very exclusive country clubs, two extremely exclusive riding stables and a hunt club in Utah that’s so exclusive Mitt Romney couldn’t get in! Not to mention my designer wardrobe – six walk-in closets full – and they are all screaming at me that if the Koch brothers declare that planet Earth isn’t getting any warmer, then it [expletive] isn’t getting any [expletive] warmer, no matter what anybody else [expletive] says! Now, how do we [expletive] this [expletive] Richard Muller up the [expletive] until he can’t [expletive] walk straight anymore?”
“By ‘we,’” I clarified, “I assume you mean yourself, your associates and… whoever funds your conspiracy.”
“Assume what you want,” she snapped. “Just give me some ideas.”
“Sure,” I readily acquiesced, “the first thing to do, obviously, is to break into his e-mail account and make copies of all his correspondence. Then check them out for anything that you can twist to fit your purposes.”
“Okay,” she nodded, “of course – that’s what we did with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Now tell me something I haven’t thought of myself.”
“Very well,” I continued, “how about you have James O’Keefe approach Muller, pretending to be a graduate student, and surreptitiously make a video of Muller answering some carefully constructed leading questions calculated to make Muller look corrupt, biased and intellectually dishonest?”
“Not bad,” she mused. “Give me a list of about twenty such questions by close of business tomorrow.”
“No problem,” I assured her. “Then there’s the Los Alamos National Laboratory conference in Santa Fe, which Dr. Muller is attending, even as we speak. Get Jason Mattera down there and have him confront Muller – without identifying himself as member of the press corps, naturally – and have him ask Muller some loaded questions calculated to make him look like he’s participating in some kind of homosexual, Socialist scientific conspiracy being run out of the UN Secretariat.”
“I don’t know if we can get Mattera down to Santa Fe on such short notice,” she cautioned, “but I like the concept. Can you give me about half a dozen candidate questions by close of business today?”
“No problem,” I assured her. “And, I assume, you will need some talking points for Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh?”
“Well,” she admitted, “it’s common knowledge in this town that the stuff you feed them is much better than that fatuous crap they come up with on their own.”
“Furthermore,” I observed, “I notice that, as of today, none of them have been able to think of anything to say about Dr. Muller.”
“I’m sure,” she snarled, “that you’ll be able to provide them with some appropriate vitriol.”
“If you like,” I offered, “you can leave for early for lunch and I will spend the rest of this consultation writing some clever sounding lines for your yammering mouthpieces to spout.”
“Great,” she sighed with obvious relief as she summarily rose to depart. “I just hope it won’t be too [expletive] expensive.”
“In the free market, the virtues of which you and your colleagues so enthusiastically espouse,” I reminded her as she quickly made for the exit, “one gets exactly what one pays for.”
“Tell me about it,” she japed as she laid her hand on the door handle, turning back to bare a cruel smile. “In this market, climate skeptics are a dime a dozen. It’s finding a loyal one who doesn’t give a [expletive] about stupid [expletive] like facts – that’s what’s going to [expletive] cost you some big [expletive] bucks!”