Climategate 101

Rich Lowry at National Review Online has a nice article, "Climate Alarmism Acknowledges Doubt," which summarizes "the state of the question" regarding the Global Warming controversy. If you are new to this debate, this is a good place to get oriented. Here is a snippet.

"Climate alarmists conjured a world where nothing was certain but death, taxes, and catastrophic global warming. They used this presumed scientific certainty as a bludgeon against the skeptics they deemed “deniers,” a word meant to have the noxious whiff of Holocaust denial.

All in the cause of hustling the world into a grand carbon-rationing scheme. Any questions about the evidence for the cataclysmic projections, any concerns about the costs and benefits, were trumped by that fearsome scientific “consensus,” which had “settled” the important questions.

A funny thing happened to this “consensus” on the way to its inevitable triumph, though. Its propagators have been forced to admit fallibility. For the cause of genuine science, this is a small step forward; for the cause of climate alarmism, it’s a giant leap backward. The rush to “save the planet” cannot accommodate any doubt, or it loses the panicked momentum necessary for a retooling of modern economic life."

Read it all here.