In Poland recently, representatives of the European Union were discussing ways to look like soldiers in the war against global warming while once more dodging the draft, and outside there were the usual sorts of doomsday-prognosticating protesters. Some were dressed as penguins, devils and polar bears, it's reported.

The uniforms strike me as about right, although I also think clown clothes and makeup would be appropriate for many of the loudest worriers about climate change, such as Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's not to say they will fail to get their way as a new president takes office amidst whoppers about how Europe is all progress on this issue while dumb, selfish America is lagging.

William Nordhaus, a Yale economics professor who says the best means to avoid throwing trillions of dollars away to little avail is a coordinated, phased-in program of carbon taxes for the whole world. But even the Nordhaus analysis rests on assumptions about warming that may not hold up, just as Obama's dire forecasts are not so clearly factual as he said in a video message to a governors climate session in California. He spoke of rising sea levels, shrinking coastlines, record droughts, spreading famines and "storms that are growing with each passing hurricane season."
Maybe he was listening to the host of the gubernatorial pow-wow, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California who recently said on "60 Minutes" that anyone who didn't accept his version of global warming also must believe in a flat Earth.

Excuse me, but any number of climate scientists known to be absolutely brilliant disagree with this impersonator of a knowledgeable public official. The whole consensus thing is a myth, at least if what you mean by consensus is widespread scientific agreement that human-induced warming is sure to destroy the planet in the absence of prompt, decisive action. There is too little data, too much that is unknown to say so.

I know, I know. Nobel Prize hero Gore says differently, but then his movie was rife with errors, his own Tennessee house was a kind of coal-fired plant in hiding and his willingness to listen to other views was amply illustrated by his 1993 role as vice president in booting Will Happer from his Energy Department job as director of research. A distinguished Princeton physicist, Happer is quoted as saying, "I am convinced the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken."
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