Uncritical “skeptics” taken in by hoax yet again

Many climate skeptics claim to be solely interested in critically assessing the science. But often, their critical glasses disappear very quickly when they look at “evidence” that confirms their predetermined notion (of climate being a non-problem).

This becomes extra clear when they uncritically push an anti-AGW story that later appears to be a hoax. This just happened (again) with a 4^th grade student who allegedly won a NSF price for “disproving global warming”. Michael Tobis did some detective work into the implausible story, and quickly found that the whole thing was faked. It is not (yet) known who perpetrated this action at the cost of a young child’s expectations. How the story spread via various internet and news media can be seen here.

It reminds me of another hoax from a few years ago, where somebody put out the word of a fake paper which allegedly disproved global warming. It was uncritically accepted as true by many self-proclaimed “skeptics”.

The author of the fake paper explained his purpose as follows:

Its purpose was to expose the credulity and scientific illiteracy of many of the people who call themselves climate sceptics. While dismissive of the work of the great majority of climate scientists, they will believe almost anything if it lends support to their position. Their approach to climate science is the opposite of scepticism.

This is shown (most likely unwittingly) to be true yet again by the current episode.

As Albert Einstein wrote in 1920:

This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.

A very fertile environment for conspiracy theories indeed.