Okay, so we’re just here with strong opinions or, through the links at the right, with evidence-based science. If you want “truth,” you have to go to people with a religious conviction – or, apparently, to people with really big funding from the energy industry.

Can we suggest Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, whose latest Cato Institute – sponsored book is called Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming (which, we have to admit, is a terrific title).

The latter link will take you to a wonderful little review on the Cato Institute website in which Michaels and Balling share their sense of certainty that the effects of unprecedented global climate change will be modest and either benign or positive. (Positive for ExxonMobil, surely.)

The most Orwellian part of their twisted argument is this:

The authors find that government funding of research has corrupted the scientific process as scientists compete for funding in a politically charged environment. Total federal spending on global climate change research has ballooned from a few million dollars to $2.1 billion annually in the last 15 years.”

So, we’re to believe that government funding, which is peer-reviewed and apportioned on merit, is suspect – is indeed “politically charged.”

Michaels and Balling clearly prefer private funding from conscientious objectors like ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, funding that is unstained by any public or political process and unfettered by the demands that their science stand up to professional scrutiny.

The truth, as Oscar Wilde once said, “is rarely pure and never simple.”

If someone tells you otherwise, be suspicious.