Climate-Gate: The O.J. Simpson Moment Revisited. By Bill McKibben, The Nation, February 25, 2010. "The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It's worth trying to understand how they've done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that's begun to recede in our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito? The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson's defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown's blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson's guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.
"If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him 'a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America's worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.' His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That's what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.
"Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 e-mails from some scientist's account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called 'Climate-gate' scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests. Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough, and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world's scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made -- that's what Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin did, insisting the e-mails proved 'scientific fascism,' and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents 'Hitler youth.' Such language filters down. I'm now used to a daily diet of angry e-mail, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: 'Nazi Moron Scumbag.'"
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