OPINION/COMMENTARY

Global Warming in a Politically Correct Climate: How Truth Became Controversial

Again and again, these events have occurred, and they're happening once more in the global warming issue, to which Mathiesen devotes the next 70 pages of his book. There's a lot of good science in there, and I learned quite a bit from the author. I especially enjoyed his descriptions of the way CO2 is absorbed by, and released from, the ocean, along with the fallacy of sampling air bubbles in 400,000-year-old ice and assuming that the air has remained inert and stable for that time span. According to Mathiesen, the environmental issues he discuses have had four things in common: 1. They were described as having been caused primarily by mankind. 2. They all led to an unhealthy confusion of politics and science. 3. Those most vociferously involved in the creation of the scares - advocacy groups, politicians, scientists, media, bureaucrats, lawyers and even industry - had a direct self-interest in promoting the mythologies. 4. Each calamity scenario contained a few grains of truth for plausibility, but woven around them was a web of emotional, misleading and scientifically incorrect fables, which ultimately became uncritically accepted elements of "common knowledge."....

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