Climate Change Kooks Fall Out

                                                              Kook vs. Kook

There is an old saying "thieves fall out".  It means that people who are by nature thieves will find it difficult to cooperate with other thieves---their instincts have a nasty habit of taking over and they wind up stealing the loot from each other.  Lots of  movies play on this theme, including a film noir classic from the 1930s entitled "Thieves Fall Out" and a made-for-TV movie from the 1980s entitled "When Thieves Fall Out".  Jessica Fletcher solved a murder mystery in Cabot Cove during an episode entitled "When Thieves Fall Out."  The same idea occurs in hundreds of heist movies like "The Italian Job", "Snatch" "Lock Stock" and Two Smoking Barrels" and "A Simple Plan."  Some of these movies are classics---- who doesn't love watching a movie where thieves try to outwit one-another?  The "thieves fall out" idea even shows up in Samurai movies like "Yojimbo" and its a common theme in Western movies ---think of any of the Clint Eastward "Man with no Name" movies. 

Everybody expects thieves to fall out.  But what about kooks?  Do people with weird and bizarre ideas rub along OK with other when they get together, or do kooks fall out the same way thieves fall out?

There is popular late night radio show in the United States called "Coast to Coast" which features an endless parade of people who claim to talk to ghosts, take spaceship rides with aliens, travel through time, have inside knowledge of secret societies out to control the world, etc., etc.  By any measure these people are kooks, and you'd think all these folks would have a hard time getting along, but its amazing how people who think the pyramids in Egypt were built by space aliens have nothing but nice things to say about people who think the pyramids in Egypt were built by time travelers.   These folks all manage to be patient and considerate with one-another,  in spite of their wildly different views.

But climate change kooks aren't quite as agreeable as time travelers and space aliens.   Recently people from "Geoengineering Watch" who believe that a secret cabal of scientists is already secretly geoengineering the earth's climate to intentionally create global warming met with some people from the "Near Term Human Extinction" movement who believe that global warming is going to be so severe that the human race will go extinct in the very near future.  You'd think these two groups would find some common ground, but they very quickly fell out over their view of the future.  Geoengineering Watch maintains that if only the secret lair of the secret cabal of scientists who are supposedly already secretly geoengineering earth's climate can be discovered, then their nefarious scheme can be stopped in time to save the earth.  This was unacceptable to the people in the Near Term Human Extinction moment, who have already give up all hope and resigned themselves to their imminent demise.  

Personally, I hope these two groups meet again and again to work things out.  Surely people who have convinced themselves that the world is about to end and humans will go extinct can find room to blame it all on a secret cabal of scientists, and surely people who believe that a secret cabal of scientists hidden in a secret lair are secretly destroying the earth's climate can see their way to believing that imminent doom is upon them.  These two groups have much to learn from one-another.