
(AP Photo )
An international conference in a European country involving complicated science and nearly 200 oft-competing agendas doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would generate a ton of eyeballs on U.S. news sites. But the two week
U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen kicking off today seems to be garnering serious attention, at least for a story that doesn't involve a certain allegedly adulterous golfer: The words "Copenhagen" and "Climategate" both appeared in Google's "
hot topics" this morning, right alongside Tiger, bowl games, Saturday Night Live and Facebook.
The interest is coming, it's fair to assume, primarily from two groups: Those who believe climate change is man-made and real – and are interested in whether international leaders make progress on addressing the issue – and those who believe that, in the
words of Homer Simpson, "it’s all a load of crap."
The former camp includes the vast majority of climate scientists as well as the residents of low-lying nations like the Maldives, where government ministers recently held a cabinet meeting underwater to stress the possibility that, due to rising water levels brought on by global warming, their country could soon disappear into the sea.
The latter, meanwhile, includes skeptics, most of them conservative, who have seized on the recent
so-called "Climategate" story to defend their position that global warming is a myth grounded in a conspiracy being perpetrated by scientists and activists around the world.
Former vice president and climate activist Al Gore – a charter member of the first camp – is meeting today with President Obama to discuss climate change at the White House. In an example of just how polarized the issue has become, two conservative members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are reportedly calling for the Oscar Gore won for the environmental documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" to be
rescinded in the wake of the Climategate e-mails.
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