The great Italian wine hoax

Those laggards at NASA, they certainly need to up their game; sending computers to Jupiter isn't rocket-science you know!

Talking about NASA I was amused to watch this recent exchange between climate-change denier and Australian politician Malcolm Roberts and Professor Brian Cox, the frustration and incredulity on the face of the latter is wonderful. 

I had my own climate-change denial moment last week whilst on holiday. I unfortunately got seated at a restaurant next to an ignorant, fat American man who, apart from being loud, opinionated and socially retarded was also (as I found out) in total denial about climate science. His contention was that the whole thing was a conspiracy dreamt up by Al Gore and NASA in order to make "billions" of dollars from US tax-payers. I pointed out that it wasn't just Al Gore that took this position, that in fact it was the majority of the worlds scientists from different countries some of whom would love nothing more than to discredit each other. He wasn't buying it, the whole conversation felt like talking to a creationist, no matter what evidence I offered the response was the same, conspiracy! I hasten to add, this person was no illiterate, he had a degree in mathematics (or at least claimed to)!

It was amusing to taunt him with the dichotomy that according to him, the same organisation (NASA) simultaneously achieved the greatest feat in human history for America, i.e. landing a man on the Moon (of which he was very patriotically proud) as well as engineering the largest scientific hoax in history designed to extort cash from the very same population? How could this possibly be? Is the integrity of US institutions so pathetically weak that they could be infiltrated to such an extent that gangsters could be subverting the most prestigious Governmental scientific organisation in the world?

At that point I resisted the urge to go for a coup-de-grace and stopped talking to him; I could see that his tiny brain was about to explode and I didn't want to ruin my glass of Italian wine, which by the way, was rather splendid... allegedly.