mike adams unveils the cold fusion cover-up

Last week, I wrote a follow up post on the living alt med conspiracy klaxon we know as Mike Adams and how he sees most of the world around him, i.e. though the standard issue crank goggles. After a furious fit which was written to slime his skeptics by using his nearly non-existent knowledge of science as a bludgeon and parading his 9/11 Truther convictions with the kind of condescension you can only get from those who are so utterly oblivious to what they say in public, they’d try to argue with you that the sky is actually purple, he decided to throw all his energies at the recent retraction of the Wakefield study which spawned today’s anti-vaxers. And to make his point, he decided to once again probe the seemingly bottomless pits of his inflamed paranoia to produce a scathing rebuke of a conspiracy to suppress cold fusion by the agents of the “hot fusion” industry.

There are three steps at being a professional conspiracy theorist. The first is to create some sort of a sinister conspiracy. No surprise there, I’m sure. However, the trick is that the conspiracy theory doesn’t need to have a connection to your field of commercial interest. It need only to exist. If you’ve already used every conspiracy you can think of, create one on the fly. Step two is to find a villain, which shouldn’t be all that tough. Just chalk it up to a big something and its nefarious agents in the media and corporations, and you’ll be fine.

You can use the good old standbys like Big Pharma or Big Oil or Big Government and its subsets like military black ops, legal machinations by lobbyists, or just big businesses in general. The last step is to use this conspiracy to attract the attention of people who vehemently oppose anything conventional and eagerly rush to embrace anything contrarian as infallible, and sell them your product using the Galileo Gambit and a quick nod to the conspiracy theory you’ve detailed. This will serve as proof that because you say something seemingly wrong, you should actually be right by the very virtue of being different, just like the poor, oppressed victims of the Big Blank. This, in a nutshell, is Mike Adams’ general business plan.

So how exactly does the great hot fusion conspiracy have anything to do with Wakefield? Well, you see, when the maverick doctor working for trial lawyers interested in suing major pharmaceutical companies and using his work to create his own version of the MMR vaccines, announced his ground-breaking results, Big Pharma tried to silence him for over a decade. Just like the evil scientists working on hot fusion tried to silence a cold fusion discovery by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons by viciously discrediting them to maintain their “hot fusion” monopoly in the apparently booming business of nuclear fusion…

The conventional physics community went berserk, attacking Fleischmann and Pons relentlessly, attempting to destroy their character and any scientific credibility they might have held. [Physicists] paraded a gang of “hot fusion” scientists through the mainstream media, telling everyone it was “impossible” to create nuclear fusion at tabletop temperatures. Through a repetition of lies, they convinced the world that Fleischmann and Pons were frauds.

Yeah, that’s a great story and all. The only problem is that it never happened. Scientists did what they do with any claim. They tested the claim that something odd was going on when current was fed through a palladium cathode in heavy water. After replicating the original setup and feeding current to the fuel cell for weeks, there was an elevation in temperature as some reaction was taking place in the heavy water. However, it wasn’t the dramatic 20°C rise reported by Fleischmann and Pons, and teams of experts couldn’t detect the tell-tale signs of fusion. There was no elevation in gamma rays or flow of neutrons in the heavy water. In fact a trial by experts from Brookhaven and Yale found an unremarkable 0.4°C rise in temperature instead. Likewise, the study by nuclear experts in the UK showed no dramatic effects and both teams ruled that the slight interactions in the fuel cell may have been problems with the instruments or the effect of cosmic rays which constantly rain down on us from the upper atmosphere, or in other words, nothing as exotic as nuclear fusion.

But forget all that scientific mumbo-jumbo about peer review and subsequent testing. Our little conspiratorial airhead has no use for those elitist tools of our invisible oppressors. Instead he insists that the only reason a cold fusion reactor isn’t supplying power to our cities today is because billions of dollars were invested in hot fusion technology and tens of thousands of lives hinge on it, which is why Fleischmann and Pons were tarred and attacked so badly that scientists went so far as to shrug at their claims and said they couldn’t replicate the results of their experiment. Their original paper was never even retracted or threatened, that’s how furious the sinister agents of the hot fusion lobby were. Really, at this point I wonder if in math class, when Adams wrote that 2 + 2 = 5 and got points off his work, he blamed his mistake on a conspiracy by Big Math and it’s insidious Big Integer agents in schools…