In most areas of science, it is considered noble to be a skeptic of a given theory, unless that theory is man-made climate change. According to Al Gore, “The debate [about climate change] in the scientific community is over,” yet the debate curiously rages on. English Prime Minister Gordon Brown, frustrated by those pesky second-guessers, proclaimed, “we mustn’t be distracted by … flat-earth climate skeptics.” Yet while those who reject the climate change orthodoxy are portrayed as denying scientific fact, the facts are overwhelmingly supporting that skeptical view.

The theory of global warming states that greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide, trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, therefore an increase in human carbon dioxide emissions could potentially cause a steady rise in temperature. Indeed, Earth’s temperature over the past century of industrialization has risen by about .5 degrees Celsius, but the theory holds that greenhouse warming should be highest in the troposphere, the place where the greenhouse warming effect begins. Utterly confounding global warming temperature models, weather balloon data has shown the opposite; the troposphere has been consistently cooler than surface temperatures. When faced with real atmospheric data, one of the most fundamental assumptions behind climate change due to greenhouse warming absolutely breaks down.

Global warming proponents use data from ice core surveys to show that there is an intimate correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature. However, as the 2007 BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle reveals, the alleged correlation is backward. Professor Ian Clark from the University of Ottawa has demonstrated from several ice core surveys that changes in the level of carbon dioxide lag behind corresponding changes in temperature by hundreds of years. Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at M.I.T., described the phenomenon thus: “The ocean is the major reservoir [of] carbon dioxide … if you heat the surface of the ocean, it tends to emit carbon dioxide.” As the sun becomes increasingly active, it warms the vast oceans which, over a process that takes hundreds of years, release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “The sun is driving climate change,” explains Solar Physicist Piers Corbyn. “Carbon dioxide is irrelevant.”

It is easy for climate change advocates to dismiss skeptics as irrational and avoid a debate that threatens their primitive ideology. Their emotional argument consists of pointing to the thermometer in self-righteous indignation, but while temperature has been increasing, so has solar activity. The intensity of the sun’s magnetic field more than doubled during the twentieth century.

That is why the Left must silence skeptics and maintain a facade of scientific consensus, for if man-made climate change were to be revealed as junk science, their radical, anti-capitalist agenda would be utterly rejected by most Americans. Government regulations, such as caps on carbon emissions, have the potential to destroy both the economic prosperity of western civilization and the industrial progress of the third world. Only global warming skeptics, armed with scientific evidence and a willingness to question authority, have a chance of stopping them.