Wesley Pruden
Washington Times
May 20, 2008

In an opinion piece for the Washington Times, columnist Wesley Pruden looks at new Republican converts to “global-warming hysteria,” including President Bush and John McCain.

Pruden notes, however, that “the myth of scientific consensus is nevertheless imploding. Lawrence Solomon, a science writer* for Toronto’s National Post and once a true believer in man-made warming, set out several months ago to profile scientific dissenters to the Chicken Little Manifesto. He called his series The Deniers, expecting to hold up dissenters to ridicule.

“‘Somewhere along the way,’ he wrote, ‘I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelon of scientists, and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction.'”

In regard to Republicans and global warming, Pruden concludes that:

“Republicans always blow hot and cold when Democrats make scary faces and cry boo in the dark. They can’t resist running on their familiar campaign slogan, ‘Vote Republican, we’re not as bad as you think.’ They never learn that, like global warming, this slogan is not as hot as they think it is.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Times.

*Lawrence Solomon is mistakenly identified here as a science writer for the National Post.

Read the full review.