The politics of the global warming debate

Gregg Easterbrook has a great post on the politics underlying the scientific debate over global warming:

Critics of instant-doomsday environmental thinking continue to be mau-maued by enviros and the liberal wing of the establishment. This is wrong in and of itself, and also stupid politics from the standpoint of convincing the world to heed warnings about global warming. The case for greenhouse-effect reform will only become persuasive once environmental science is depoliticized.

Read the whole post — and Easterbrook doesn’t even mention all of the salient criticisms of the environmentalists. UPDATE: A mea culpa partial retraction of the endorsement for Easterbrook’s post — he erred in his description of the politics underlying one of the two cases that form the basis of the post. See David Appell for more on this, as well as the discussion thread below. Thanks to multiple commenters below for the heads-up. Another treatment can be found in the Technology Review article to which Easterbrook linked. Interesting quote:

Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate. I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium. Love to believe? My own words make me shudder. They trigger my scientist’s instinct for caution. When a conclusion is attractive, I am tempted to lower my standards, to do shoddy work. But that is not the way to truth. When the conclusions are attractive, we must be extra cautious.

FINAL UPDATE: The Economist has a story suggesting that non-industrial forms of human activity also affect global warming.