lobal warming just might be the most important problem facing Western civilization after all. Not because of anything the globe is doing, but rather because of the scientifically-proven fact that our politicians have all gone stark raving mad and could well agree to a plan, proposed at 2009's Copenhagen Summit, and bound to be re-introduced sooner or later, to cut carbon dioxide emissions--and our economic output--by as much as 95%.

The consensus at Copenhagen seems to have been that such an agreement is the only way third-world countries can avoid being “incinerated,” as Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese delegate at the conference, put it.

The EPA has gone one step further, and decreed that CO2, along with methane and four other greenhouse gases (hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and nitrous oxide, or laughing gas) shall henceforth be referred to as “pollutants.” Even the mainstream media, certainly no stranger to laughing gas (or methane--but let's not go there), recognized that this may have been nothing more than a political maneuver designed to intimidate Congress into passing an economy-crushing cap-and-trade carbon tax: if Congress doesn't act to wreck our economy, the EPA is saying, we will, and no revenue for you!

However, when it comes to wrecking the economy, I think we can be confident that Congress will be up to the task, even without a cap-and-trade bill. Experience matters.

The only problem is that carbon dioxide, by any reasonable definition, is not a threat. Not counting our recent cooling period (or somehow massaging it away), the average global temperature, we were told, has increased by 0.6 degrees Celsius since 1900. To put this into perspective, 0.6 degrees is just barely within the human body's ability to detect. Not quite incineration, but getting there, if you exaggerate it by a three or four orders of magnitude.

The new EPA ruling is not based on any observably harmful changes in the environment. Contrary what Al Gore may have told you, sea levels have not risen significantly, the Arctic ice is melting and re-freezing pretty much as usual (although the amount of ice seems to depend on whom you ask), the main part of Antarctica is colder than ever, and hurricanes have, if anything, decreased in severity. The ruling is based solely on what a small number of scientists, who are psychologically committed to one specific conclusion, think might happen.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the original data that back up the warmularians' most fundamental claim, that the Earth had been heated up by almost a whole degree since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid to late 1800s, have been conveniently erased (to save space, of course; after all, the globe is a small place), or burned up by the earth's heat, or eaten by their dog , or something. And now we learn that some of the climatologists who have been fattening the pages of Science and Nature each week with articles about global warming, the end of the world, and similar stuff have been conspiring to massage their data and crush free debate, raising the very real possibility that, in fact, it has all been a lie and there has actually been no warming at all.

In fact, Climategate is only the latest in a long string of revelations of apparent data manipulation by climatologists. The infamous Hockey Stick is the most well known. More recently, some New Zealand climatologists were caught peddling another temperature curve that had apparently been fraudulently manipulated to show warming. Then there was the time somebody accidentally filed October's temperatures under N for November, and they went around screaming the planet had started burning up. Of course, none of this proves the Earth isn't warming. But it's fair to ask, as columnist Mark Steyn did: if it's real, why is it necessary to lie about it?

How Trustworthy is Science?

Climategate has spawned a new wave of concern about fraud and the trustworthiness of science in general. If climatologists cannot be trusted to tell the truth, what about other branches of science? The credibility and status of each branch of science are determined by the degree of rigor, accuracy, and predictive power it has achieved. Some fields at the very bottom, like homeopathic medicine, astrology, and Britney Spears studies, as interesting as they may be, have zero predictive power and have long since been cast out of science altogether. Average people walking down the street, who are typically more concerned about problems of the moment like the dripping from their rapidly-melting ice cream cone, may not realize that there's a strong pecking order in science, and that climatology is, well, not at the top of it.

Some people even claim to have lost faith in science as an institution. In an article in the Dec 3, 2009 Wall Street Journal   titled "Climategate: Science Is Dying", Daniel Henninger wrote:

Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies.

Henninger's title alone should win him an award for the most hyperbole ever in a political article. But his point is valid: in gender studies, it doesn't matter whether the evidence supports your conclusion, as long as you conclude that white males are the oppressor. Since everyone already knows the conclusion (and those who don't can be easily dismissed as “male oppression deniers”), you could make up any data you want and nobody would care. In science, you're allowed to be wrong (although, it is hoped, not all the time), and you're even allowed to have a crazy theory, but if you lie and falsify your data, even if your motive is to “save the planet,” your credibility is shot and all your past work is suspect.

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