Scholars have been debating that question for ages, along with “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it make a sound?” and “Why don’t we see any baby squirrels” and “What the heck is happening on ABC’s Lost?”

[BTW, if anyone actually knows what the heck is happening on Lost, how Sayid ends up being Ben's hitman (!), let me know -- I still believe the "island is purgatory" theory -- it certainly is for viewers -- even though it has been debunked by the show's creator. As if! I guess that makes me a Lost denier ... but I digress.]

I was inspired to re-examine this age-old question after the recent remarks of the Disinformer-in-Chief in his keynote address at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC), a ministerial-level conference hosted by the U.S. government. He said:

Now, look, I understand stereotypes are hard to defeat. People get an image planted in their head, and sometimes it causes them not to listen to the facts. But America is in the lead when it comes to energy independence; we’re in the lead when it comes to new technologies; we’re in the lead when it comes to global climate change — and we’ll stay that way. (Applause.)

[Side note: The "Is it still disinformation if the speaker gets applause?" question was actually settled by Aristotle himself in his little known book -- The Duh of Rhetoric.]

Now I do think that the President actually believes what he is saying — even though he has been no friend of renewables and even though the second sentence obviously applies better to him than anybody in his audience, perhaps than anybody who ever walked the Earth. Indeed, if Bush were on the new reality show The Moment of Truth, strapped to a lie detector, I’m sure he’d break the bank.

If the speaker actually believes the utter falsehoods that he or she utters are true, then technically those words probably qualify as “misinformation.” I am, however, here proposing Romm’s Rule of Disinformation: Even when speakers believe the nonsense being spouted, misinformation becomes disinformation if it meets at least 2 of these 4 criteria:

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Okay, so at the recent Heartless Heartland skeptic/denier/disinformer/climate-destroyer conference [I promise to propose a better term this week], one of the few attendees who was a non-non-believer in science emailed me the following:

Marc Morano, Sen. Inhofe’s press secretary, just cited your post on the dangers of consensus as an example of how deniers are forcing climate action proponents to retreat. “We’re making them afraid of using the term ‘consensus’!“

Now that is humor! After all, my article is titled “The cold truth about climate change: Deniers say there’s no consensus about global warming. Well, there’s not. There’s well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome],” and it explains that

1. ‘Consensus’ is far too weak a word to describe the collective scientific understanding of the dangers of human-caused global warming
2. The reality of climate change is almost certainly going to be much worse than the ‘consensus’ as that term is normally used (to describe the IPCC reports)
3. The deniers are peddling pseudoscience.

I confess that RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt did warn me that the disinformers might do this, and I was skeptical they would contemplate such Orwellian rhetoric [I am a skeptic at heart]. Silly me. Sillier Morano. Silliest Inhofe.

As the WSJ environmental blog noted, the Heartland disinfomer conference ended with more unintentional humor — a “Manhattan Declaration” whose first recommendation was:

Now, therefore, we recommend: That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The WSJ thinks it’s funny they would start with an attack on Gore — and it is. But I think what’s even funnier is that the disinformers urged world leaders to reject the IPCC even though the leaders’ representatives already signed off on a line-by-line edit/review of all the IPCC summaries.

The second recommendation is much less funny:

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Wait … that sounds strangely familiar…. My Dante is a bit rusty, but I believe it was … La Divina Commedia … yes, now it’s coming to me … Canto III.9:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

My mediaeval Tuscan is even rustier, but I think the line translates something like:

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.