Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

The Australian (a newspaper from guess where) has one of the best articles I've ever read on the climate change debate, and I encourage you all to read it at:
"Climate facts to warm to", Christopher Pearson, The Australian, 3/22/08
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

One of the highlights of the article are its discussion of new data which seem to pour even more cold water on Al Gore's hot air. (Pun intended, of course) and how the enviro-alarmist industry is struggling to cope with the information.

Another highlight is the description of pro-alarmist media bias which obviously is not contained to the US. Author Ian McEwan wrote an article on the subject recently, as he tours Australia, in part promoting an upcoming novel dealing with climate change. While the article was not particularly skeptical of global warming, at least one paragraph of it would cause one to wonder whether McEwan is indeed a skeptic, as those of us who don't drink the Algore kool-aid are called. The Age left out that paragraph in their version of the article, without noting that they had edited the article.

According to the news story linked at the beginning of this note, here's the paragraph that was left out:

"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"

To be sure, Tasmania's Mercury News has a very valid question wondering why a best-selling fiction author should be given so much space on op-ed pages discussing science when he does not seem to have any qualifications to do so. (Well, neither does Al Gore.) Here's the Mercury's take...and it's something we could easily apply when we have to suffer through hearing Laurie David or Cheryl Crow:

Stick to the fiction, mate, Greg Barns, The Mercury, Tasmania, 3/10/08
http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,23348430-5006550,00.html

In any case, I sense a slow but sure turn away from the disastrous certainty of the media in accepting that CO2 is about to end the human race. The data is proving otherwise, and the behavior of those who are building careers by scaring people and government into giving them money is becoming too transparently self-serving to be ignored.