EXPOSING THE WARMERS – AT 10:49 A.M. ET:  George Will, who's been quite good recently, writes one of the best columns I've read about the global-warming controversy:

Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri.

He is chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says:

"They are the same people who deny the link between smoking and cancer. They are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder -- and I hope they put it on their faces every day."

Do not judge him as harshly as he speaks of others. Nothing prepared him for the unnerving horror of encountering disagreement.

That is, of course, the point.  The warmers are involved as much in political science as actual science, if not more so.  They are shocked that anyone could possibly disagree with them.  These are the kind of people who'd put their College Board scores on their gravestones.

And there is this gem from Will:

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change -- yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government -- warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

COMMENT:  Wonderfully stated.  One of the tragedies of this controversy, and the revelations of sloppiness and falsification on the warming side, is that it has shaken Americans' respect for science.  If some in the scientific establishment would get their noses out of the air for a few moments, they'd realize what a decline in respect can mean for the funding of their disciplines, and do something about it...fast.

February 21, 2010