Full confession: I still don't think I'm competent to make an independent judgment on whether Global Warming is real or bogus. I do know when you lose boring-centrist-PBS-talking-head types, you've--well, maybe not lost the war, but still been thrown back a zillion yards behind the line of scrimmage:
The Death of Global Warming
The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.
The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics. ...
That's the ever-so-respectable
Walter Russell Mead in the usually-pretty-sane
American Interest. Don't misread it: Mead is not a denier. When he says "bad science and bad politics.
," what he really means is "bad politics." He says:
The urge to make the data better than it was didn’t just come out of nowhere. The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources — was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.
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