Denier

Apocalyptic loons

Unlike the Prince of Wales, Mark Stein describes himself as a "climate insouciant." Indeed, Mark finds it

it far scarier than any "climate change" that leaders of advanced western nations now go around sounding like the kind of apocalyptic loons who used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and passing out homemade leaflets.

Then there's the awkward fact that there has been no "global warming" since 1998. If you're the Prince of Wales and the ruddy glow of late middle-age is beginning to fade from your cheeks, then 1998 isn't that long ago. Nevertheless: There has been no "global warming" since Monica was dropping to the Oval Office broadloom. If you're one of Dr Mann's Penn State meteorology students, there has been no warming since before you entered kindergarten. Climate scientists have struggled to account for what, a decade-and-a-half in, they began discreetly to acknowledge as a "pause" in warming. There are theories that the heating may have continued during this period but that it's being stored somewhere in the deepest depths of the oceans.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

When it emerged that Dr Mann was suing National Review, a couple of the lefty bloggers mocked me, a former theatre critic, for presuming to criticize one of the world's allegedly most eminent scientists. But climate science turns out to be pretty much like Broadway: No one knows nothing, as Irving Caesar, the lyricist of No, No, Nanette, once said to me. The principal difference is that, unlike the theatre, on the Great Warm Way the world's longest-running flop never closes.

We "deniers" are not the ones in denial.

An ad at Steyn Online reminds us that the "Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st Century" is coming soon to the DC District Court.