Why do global warming believers fear a debate???

I contrast global warming with the debate on evolution. While it is clear that evolution is a fact, it doesn't stop scientists debating the issue - in fact, scientists love to take on the creationists. But, on global warming, the believers just won't debate..

Newsweek's global-warming cover story purports to reveal the "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry" that for the past two decades "has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change." It's the same story run repeatedly in mainstream media: The overwhelming majority of scientists believe the debate on global warming is over - but if there are any dissenting scientists left, they've been bought.

Here's the rub: If dissent is so rare, why do global-warming conformists feel the strong need to argue that minority views should be dismissed as nutty or venal? Why not posit that there is such a thing as honest disagreement on the science?

As for the overwhelming majority of scientists believing that man is behind global warming, former NASA scientist Roy Spencer, now at the University of Alabama, told me: "It's like an urban legend. There has never been any kind of vote on this issue." He referred me to a 2003 survey in which two German environmental scientists asked more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries if they thought humans caused climate change: Fifty-six percent answered yes, 30 percent said no.

What really frosts me about the Newsweek story is that it concentrates on industry funding for skeptics while ignoring the money that pours into pro-global-warming coffers. That focus ignores where the big grant money goes: to pay for crisis-mongering research. Or as Reid Bryson, the father of scientific climatology, told the Capital Times in Madison, Wis.: "If you want to be an eminent scientist, you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh, global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.'"