Give me a break. Yet another journalist, this timeMargaret Wente, has written yet another article about how "global warming ain't so bad" after experiencing the odd Toronto weather. Like so many others, she doesn't really understand the science behind global warming, complaining that "trying to get my head around the ins and outs of carbon sinks, emissions trading, and megatons of CO2" is apparently too much work. Like so many others, her ignorance of the scientific bases leads her to the laughable conclusion that "it isn't about reason. It's about faith". Yeah, because peer-review is big on faith. Finally, like so many others, she invokes the name of Bjorn Lomberg in her defense, hauling out his heavily-criticized book as a way of supporting her point of view without an eye to possible flaws.

It wouldn't be so bad were it not for passages like this:

Mr. Lomborg has become Public Enemy No. 1 among environmental groups. Even in the science world, which is supposed to operate on facts and logic, he has been reviled. Scientific American devoted a large part of an issue to rebutting him. Science trashed him. Nature likened him to a Holocaust denier.

All good points, which she then goes on to ignore in her apparent zeal to support Lomborg because he agrees with them. Margaret, did it possibly cross your mind that those rebuttals, trashings, and the like are actually valid? That the scientists just might have a legitimate point? I can understand this sort of behaviour from some random neo-con dork emailing Sullivan, but I would have thought that one of the premier columnists in Canada would know better. At the very least, this sort of thing...

Even so, I don't advise you to go around in public suggesting that global warming might not be so bad after all. People will be chilly. Global warming is at the heart of our cultural belief system. And it's never prudent to attack the faith.

...is just juvenile. Even the worst doctrinaire blogger would rethink this sort of argument.