By now I’m sure everyone knows that global warming is one of the last cards the hard Left has left to play. Their predictament evokes the title of Kazuo Ishiguro’s book “Remains of the Day.”

In the United States, and increasingly in Europe, there are few professional scholars or politicians, even on the Left, who do not try to distance themselves from the traditional nanny-state, interventionist ideas and policies that have defined this political spectrum.

Yet, just when the world appears on the verge of incinerating the ideology, along comes Al Gore and the theory of man-induced global warming (or vica versa)—and the wholesale buy-in into it from the media. Global warming, of course, requires the government to save us from ourselves, a God-send for the Left if there ever was one. Which is why the dearth of tropical storms making land-fall this summer has had to be a concern to the Left.

An increase in the number and severity of tropical storms is a supposed consequence of global warming (even though there is practically no accurate way of gauging what an “increase” might be because the incidence of tropical storms has only been accurately tracked for the last 100 years or so.) But alas, in the form of Ernesto, the wait is over. One can literally hear the corks popping off the champagne as the Left celebrates.

In Canada today the headline of country’s largest newspaper, The Globe and Mail, proclaimed (in Times-Square size font) “Storm Zeroes in on Florida.” The article spends most of its words rehashing Katrina and neglects to mention once that Ernesto had only 50-mile-an-hour winds, barely a tropical storm, as it passed over Haiti. It was upgraded to a hurricane when winds just reached 75 mph, but was expected to weaken as it passed over Cuba.

The Globe, like all the media, is adamantly pro-global warming. Central to this view (which distinguishes it from science) is that evidence for man-induced global warming is, in the words of Al Gore, “beyond discussion.” I’m sorry, this is science and it is not beyond discussion.

Like the theory of evolution, the theory of man-induced global warming is not testable. Unlike the theory of evolution, man-induced global warming has far less evidence to support it.

We have evidence of a slight warming trend in global surface temperatures (less than 1 degree Celsius) over the past 100 years, but there is scads of open debate in the scientific community about the probable causes. Glaciers began receding in the late 19th century, well before the approximate 25% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, a by-product of the burning of fossil fuels, an indisputable sign that the earth began warming naturally as it came out of a period know as the Little Ice Age.

And remember carbon dioxide is less than 2% of the total of combined greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor constitutes 98% of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and has been constant. I have tried to point out these nuances without much luck. I have emailed the Globe’s editor Ed Greenspon and told him about about my interview with NASA researcher Claire Parkinson, who reminds people that there is more ice on the the earth today than in much of the earth’s geological history. I have emailed the Globe’s chief environmental reporter Martin Mittlestadt and urged him to practice the once common journalistic method of seeking secondary or dissenting opinions.

I tracked down the pro-man-induced-global warming-theory atmospheric scientist Greg Holland who mentioned in a Discovery article that indeed many scientists dispute the theory and asked him to answer some questions and provide some names. I have not heard back from any of these people. Indeed it appears that for believers in global warming, the issue really is beyond discussion.

Yet, imagine around 12,000 years ago there was a newspaper located in say southern Illinois. Each day the editor would walk out of the office and make the following observation: “The damn glacier is melting.” Every once in awhile the editor would bring up the melting ice to his staff, who would argue that how possibly could a glacier melting a few centimeters a year be a story? This was obviously long before political parties and research grants.

Yet the damn glacier would keep on melting, without any help from man, and eventually form (thank goodness) the largest fresh water reservoir in the world, the Great Lakes.

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