Talk about a geeky project: the remarkable mantleplumes.org site is compiling, from volunteer submissions, a "Foundations" list of the top 100 publications. It's at 69 items right now, and skews heavily toward the last half-century and the skeptics side of the mantle-plumes debate. That's OK; it also includes, for example, James Hutton's original 1785 address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a fascinating historical survey by Rudolph Trümpy, "Why Plate Tectonics Was Not Invented in the Alps."

The publication of what appears to be a sloppy hit-piece book on Barack Obama has prompted the netherworld topic of abiotic petroleum to bob up into the media spotlight. Jerome Corsi, author of the new book with the scurrilous title Obama Nation, has also written at least one article promoting the strange Soviet-era theory that crude oil and natural gas have their origin not from the remains of buried organic matter, but from chemical reactions deep in the Earth's mantle. (Instead his example is just serpentinization.)

I call it strange, but in fact it repeats a pattern familiar in the history of geology, the downfall of attractive, first-principles approaches in the face of field evidence. Biblical flood theory (Diluvialism) and the antiquity of the Earth are two familiar topics from the 1800s where the rocks prevailed over the arm-wavers. Rather than go into the history of abiotic oil (try Geoffrey Glasby's review in Resource Geology), I'll just note that the theory deals with an Earth before plate tectonics, and it relies on first principles and laboratory physics (points of Soviet pride) rather than geologic evidence.

The rhetoric of today's abiotic-oil campaign also repeats a familiar circular pattern, this one from the creationist "intelligent design" and "anti-global-warming" campaigns:

• A contrarian passion—I don't like it, so it must be wrong
• A black-and-white worldview—everything they know is totally wrong
• Accusations of mental flaws in the mainstream—they hate me because they hate being wrong
• Eager jumping to wishful political conclusions—oil cannot ever run out

Enjoy a bracing dip into this paranoid school from its foremost proponent at gasresources.net.

It may go without saying that the blogs are full of this style of discourse, including those devoted to the Obama and McCain campaigns.