Yesterday on Google+, I posted something of eureka moment, which could go a long way toward forcing more concerted action on addressing the human contribution to global climate change:
If there was a climate change conspiracy, it should be fabricating evidence that atmospheric carbon inversely correlates with male genitalia size. Convince men than burning fossil fuels shrinks their junk, and they’d cover half the planet in solar panels before you could say “look at the size of that hockey stick.”
I’ve given it a little more thought, and I think I was slightly off the mark there. It would probably be more effective to build a case that an individual’s contribution to overall carbon output is inversely related to his genital size. Convince men that a smaller carbon footprint equals an increase in penile length and/or girth. Get them sitting in bars, bragging about how little CO2 they produce, and I’d be willing to bet that humanity could become carbon neutral in a generation.
The premise that this cockamamie (ha) idea is based on, the oft-repeated notion of a cabal of climate scientists, conspiring to overstate (or create from scratch) the evidence for a changing global climate, is absurd on its face. The only halfway-reasonable motivation for concocting such a scheme that I’ve ever heard advanced is the notion that climate scientists are hoaxing their way into continued research funding. Which makes sense for about a second and a half, until you realize that the money, the real money, is being used to seed doubt and dissent, and mislead the public into thinking that climate change is still being debated by anyone who actually knows anything about climate science.
The five biggest oil companies, who have more to gain than anyone from our continued reliance on fossil fuels, made somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 billion in profits in 2011. Any credentialed, credible climate scientist who was willing to make the case that climate change wasn’t real, or wasn’t worth worrying about, would have to be SCUBA certified to not be killed in the ensuing flood of money that would come his or her way. The fact that gaggles of climate scientists* aren’t publishing with oil money says something huge about their priorities, e.g. actually doing science rather than propagandizing for the far more lucrative status quo.
All of which leads me back to my original point, and a final revision of my plan. The real way to get action on ameliorating the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change is to convince politicians that overall carbon output inversely correlates with votes. Or even better, we could make that correlation real.
*Points will be awarded for the best proposed name for a group of climate scientists. Leave your entry in the comments.