Climate Change Debunk Officially Debunked. Can We STFU Now?

Remember how those hacked emails from the University of East Anglia climate-research group spread around the Web and served as a great big helping of raw meat for the skeptics and deniers? Every know-nothing, every corporate stooge and every right-wing anti-intellectual working to derail legislation that might save the planet seized their opportunity to yell "busted!"

But guess what? The debunk is officially debunked. After a year or so of bullsh*t has has been spread around on the back of a hoax on a "hoax", the retractions are in:

British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty... an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.

So will the wingnuts now shut up? Can we gently steer James Inhofe away from the media mics and back into the day room to catch up on his coloring books? I'd guess not.

Because like every big, self-serving lie, the climate-change "hoax" will just keep on trucking like an 18-wheeler of wrong spewing black clouds of misinformation while the truth sits ignored on the shoulder flashing its hazards like a stalled Prius. We ain't interested in the truth if it doesn't jibe with our opinion. Or if it comes with the potential to shave a few cents off corporate profits.