I Pity the Fools...

I guess it is just too easy to throw out something that sounds like science and fool global warming skeptics.  Alister Doyle of Reuters:

It must have seemed almost too good to be true to climate sceptics who doubt mounting evidence that global warming is man-made — finally, a report showing that nature is to blame.

Only one problem — it’s a hoax.

Why someone went to the trouble of creating a previously unknown “Journal of Geoclimatic Studies” based in Japan, is anyone’s guess.

The study says bacteria naturally living in sediments of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans emit 300 times more carbon dioxide than industrial activity — one of very few reports to challenge findings by the U.N. climate panel that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are “very likely” to be the main cause of warming.

The hoax website is no longer available except cached via Google.

Here is an excerpt from the supposed "discussion" section of the "published paper":

These findings place us in a difficult position. We feel an obligation to publish, both in the cause of scientific objectivity and to prevent a terrible mistake - with extremely costly implications - from being made by the world's governments. But we recognise that in doing so, we lay our careers on the line. As we have found in seeking to broach this issue gently with colleagues, and in attempting to publish these findings in other peer-reviewed journals, the "consensus" on climate change is enforced not by fact but by fear. We have been warned, collectively and individually, that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding, but that we also jeopardise the funding of the departments for which we work.

Quite obvious that this would not be in a discussion section of a peer-reviewed scientific journal paper (as it discusses nothing of the science being presented -- but just typical climate denial rhetoric about how skeptics are shunned).  And I am sure it would be quite obvious to a scientifically savvy skeptic who lives to question real science and actually read up on climate science in real journals.
 
So a couple of questions from all of this...  If it is a rule of thumb to climate skeptics that all of the peer-reviewed climate science is just bunk -- then why do they have to create a hoax?  Shouldn't it just be easy to disprove the supposed science?  Why not just argue the points against the consensus science out there?

That must just be too hard...

UPDATE:  It appears that it was not a skeptic who performed the hoax.

I disagree with this sort of social experimentation.  It only polarizes this topic even more.