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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Destructive?

Only an asshat would dipute the facts. Meanwhile, back to reality: From the NY Times of 23 Apr 2009:

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming. ...

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

But politics is more important than reality. Any good extremist knows that lying is acceptable.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”

If being an asshat is being honest (a threat to wacko extremist who routinely lie) then so be it. Feel free to use a term that wackos extremists use. Meanwhile, even scientists in the "Global Warming does not exist" coalition said the problem was real. To keep people ignorant, wackos hype confusion. That means false accusations, hyping the myth purveryors as responsible scientists, ignoring what science really says, and … anything to create confusion. To promote a political agenda for the destruction of mankind. ‘Saddam has WMDs’ comes from the same people using the same logic that says global warming does not exist. Even their own scientists say it is irrefutable. And still some would instead believe Rush Limbaugh and Wingnut News.