I did an interesting search today comparing public searches for “Global warming” with that of “Mars”. There is a strange co-incidence of changes that occur in 2009 (the year of Climategate).

It seems that the year Global Warming (blue) died as a major interest by the public, was the year Mars (Red) took off. Venus provides a control by showing no real trend at all during this period. It therefore seems likely that whilst interest in Venus is not related to Global warming, that interest in Mars is – and that the increased interest in Mars had a related cause to the sharp decline in interest in “Global Warming”.
Let me show you a blow up of metrics for Mars, Venus, Global warming around Climategate:

Climategate occurs at the end of 2009 and it results in a relatively small peak in interest in global warming. A few months later (late June 2010) interest in global warming drops and it never recovers.
That same month we start seeing headlines like: “Record 520-Day Mock Mars Mission Begins in Russia“. Then late June 2010, we see a dramatic and sustained increase in the interest in Mars.
Of course, the US Democrats will now believe that Global Warming died due to Russian interference (so they also promoted interest in Mars? What to send the US economy of a long and pointless wild goose chase?)
However, if you want real conspiracies:

Students Discover Cave on Mars

Realistically, I think that what this shows is that after Climategate, those that were pushing global warming decided to swap to pushing Mars. The obvious candidates with an interest in both fields are:

• NASA – who perhaps thought Climategate had killed environ-mentalism as a long term source of funding NASA and so sought other “reasons” for the US public to pay
• US government – see Mars as a way to get the public off the stupid Global Warming alarmism cult
• The Russians (or Chinese) realising that the US is not going to commit economic suicide after Climategate – decide to encourage it to commit economic suicide by attempting to go to Mars.
• News corp “science” reports got fed up of “Global Boring” and so starting covering Space instead.
• There really was a cave on Mars filled by aliens and that in order to save humanity some film star has to spend most of the US’s economic output to go and talk to them (why does no one ever phones aliens?)