Someone on the FaceBook Climate Change group asked a reasonable question:
I'm trying to understand this big conspiracy everyone keeps hinting at, but never explains, now lets say AGW is a complete Hoax and Obama has somehow tricked the world to help him to trick americans to pay more taxes and put solar panels on their roof, now can someone explain how this evil conspiracy works, like who wins,who profits from this con, , what is the end game...?
I thought my response might be of interest to readers here:"Conspiracy" is too simple. There are a variety of reasons why different people wildly exaggerate the implications of AGW. They include:Politicians in poor countries who want to use claims of harm to their countries to get rich governments to give them money. Politicians in rich countries who want arguments for subsidizing firms run by their supporters, passing regulations that give them power, collecting taxes, and a variety of other things.News media that want to get readers. "Global warming is going to flood New York City" is a better story than "Global warming has raised sea levels by eight inches over the past century and might raise them by another couple of feet by the end of this century."People who want to pretend to themselves and others that they are part of the intellectual elite, know important things that others deny. People who like imagining catastrophe. You see the same pattern on the other side of the political spectrum with survivalists, and more generally with collapse of civilization science fiction.The combined effect has been to convert positions on global warming from a scientific dispute to an identity marker for ideology. You can see the effect reading this group--people keep wandering away from climate questions to gun control or whether Obama is good or bad or other things linked to ideology.Once you have that linkage, there is strong pressure on either side to take more extreme positions. Believing that global warming is a problem marks you as a loyal member of the blue tribe. So believing that it is a really big problem marks you as a very loyal member, whereas suggesting that it might be a minor problem marks you as a possible traitor to tribal loyalty. Similarly on the other side. Doubting the catastrophic story is all very well--but it's a stronger signal of red tribe loyalty to claim that warming is a fraud due to doctored figures, or that you have a scientific proof that AGW is wrong, or ... .