Where Are All the Sock Puppets?

I've noted that my recent "global warming" postings have garnered precisely zero comments over the last few days. Part of the reason is, I'm sure, that Luther and I, mightily distracted by a host of family issues, have been pretty irregular bloggers over the last year or so--and readers tend to move on if they're not getting their accustomed daily dose.

Nonetheless, previous postings on this subject have generally resulted in numerous commentaries by climate-change cranks who revile us as the moral equivalent of Holocaust-deniers and usually offer the same piles of bogus data recently unmasked as either fraudulent or manipulated into a fraudulent state. These cranks have included various sock puppets. (One of whom was probably the early Glenn Greenwald before he became allegedly respectable. More backup here.)

What the "global warming" fanatics would generally do, it appears, is troll the net constantly via Google or other search engines or algorithms, burrowing into every nook and cranny to unearth "global warming" nonbelievers wherever they might lurk. Once discovered, these unfortunates would be bombarded with all manner of smears, slanders, and bogus scientific data which they, of course, accepted unquestioningly, figuring that everyone else should be as gullible as they, I guess. It happened to us on numerous occasions.

This time around, as I've indicated, we've been met with stony commentary silence by the climate freakologists. There are only two possible explanations:

1. The outing of the apparent East Anglia climate change data fraud has stunned the True Believers into a befuddled silence. Or,
2. Due to the East Anglia scandal, the eco-freaks are employing the same time-honored tenured professor trick that tenured professors (including the alleged frauds) have employed from time immemorial: the academic cone of silence. The enemy is simply ignored to death. If he's an academic, he's quietly denied authorial access to peer-reviewed journals, one by one, passed over for departmental promotions, or, if a newbie, denied tenure and sent packing for an uncertain future since he's been blackballed. The cone of silence (and here) also extends to the more popular media. The MSM find out soon enough who's on the outs and make sure he never gets any coverage, thus keeping his name and theories out of web searches because the unfortunate dude is simply not there. He's vanished. Professionally dead. A nice Stalinist trick--execution, effectively, but without the bloody mess.

We suspect both tactics are being employed right now with reference to our own comments as well as those of better known bloggers. If these people can't silence you, they'll try to make you disappear by robbing you of the oxygen of media coverage.

Unfortunately, this time, we're catching the scent of a few MSM renegades who, degraded though the profession has become, still sniff a real story here and can't resist, even though they might be risking their careers. Ditto a few professors, like this one. These links are getting out on the web. Meanwhile, the borrowed data are being mined.

I suspect this story is not going to go away. We, at least, will do our part to keep things front and center as events unfold.