Is The Tide Turning Against AGW?

As Kimberly Strassel reports, the number of Anthropogenic Global Warming skeptics is growing by leaps and bounds, despite what you may have heard from the MSM.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

What is driving the growing number of skeptics? Evidence. Worldwide data that disputes or invalidates many of the clams being made by AGW proponents, and in turn, putting the various theories about AGW to the test. In this case, a test they are failing.

But that hasn't stopped the US Congress from going forward with legislation that is based upon the ever less relevant AGW theories. After all, Congress doesn't want to be confused by facts. Instead, they'll push to throw a monkey wrench into the US economy that will do nothing to abate AGW, but it will make them feel better. After all, the Left is all about feelings.