GLOBAL COOLING:

Climate-Change Fervor Cools Amid Disputed Science (Kim Chipman, Feb. 22, 2010, Bloomberg)

“One reason people signed on to USCAP when it was trendy was the notion that the train was leaving the station,” Maisano said. “Now that movement on legislation has slowed to a crawl, many of these companies don’t see a benefit in being involved.”

Obama came to office last year pledging to enact “cap-and- trade” legislation that would limit carbon-dioxide emissions and establish a market in the trading of pollution allowances. A House-passed measure has stalled in the Senate.

“The push to move very rapidly on new climate-change laws looks like it has hit a stone wall,” said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in December showed 54 percent of those questioned believe that action should be taken to deal with climate change, down from 64 percent in 2007.

Skepticism also may be on the rise in the U.K. A poll conducted for BBC News this month found 25 percent of people surveyed didn’t believe in global warming, a rise of 10 percentage points from November.

Public doubt has been fed by climate scientists’ e-mails obtained from computers at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. in November, Representative Inglis said.

Scientists referred in the messages to a “trick” used to smooth out data showing an anomaly in the trend toward higher global temperatures, and wrote about blocking articles by climate-change critics from a report by a UN panel.

“Now we see that that science has been pretty well debunked,” Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who has called man-made global warming a hoax, said on CNN in December.

But who isn't enjoying hearing the Brights tell us that the Science doesn't matter, we should act anyway?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2010 2:50 PM