Hate mail?

No, I love it. (An old Houston Press joke.)

The saying is, the easiest job in the world should be head coach of the Notre Dame football team, since in what other job do you have ten million people telling you precisely what you're doing wrong?

On the topic of the climate, I am twice blessed with such help. The first, someone called O'Nan Amos (which I must assume is a pseudonym), who we join in full flight (he--or she--is in italics:

There is a difference between renegade theories like global cooling (picked up by the media because it was sexy and scary) and peer-reviewed, scientific consensus based on years of data collection and mathematical modeling.

Right. Like "the population bomb" was sexy and scary. Like "DDT will kill millions" wasn't sexy and scary. (DDT actually did kill millions--by its absence, when millions contracted malaria.) Like "nuclear power equals the China Syndrome" was sexy and scary. Like "Everyone's getting AIDS" was sexy and scary.

Global warming not "sexy and scary"? Have they been handing out Oscars to movies dealing with dehydration in Africa brought about by kids crapping their innards out due to unclean water? Has Leonardo DiCaprio been speaking on the topic? Madonna singing?

Right now "global warming"--with its blame for oil companies and fat suburbanites with their SUVs and roaring air conditioners--is the sexiest (and scariest) issue on the planet, especially for liberals. I mean, a worldwide crisis that just happens to justify massive government intervention in our lives, our cars, what we put in our cars, the shape of our toilets, our light bulbs. The New York Times has already come out for regulations on political speech, gun ownership, and (thanks to Kelso) the limited extent to which our private property is actually ours. Why not every other aspect of our lives?

It's like the "face" on Mars. There are cool photographs and one guy who claimed to represent NASA but was actually a discredited former consultant, and all of a sudden people think that aliens must have built a face on Mars. That's not science, and neither is using your own anecdotal evidence to "refute" global warming.

Well, I never believed in the "face" on Mars. (It was never peer-reviewed like, say, the Man in the Moon.) But consider these reports from the mid-seventies, which reflected much more than the work of "one guy":

Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976): "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation."

Science Digest (February 1973): "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age."

Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975): "Meteorologists are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling.

New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975): Global cooling "may mark the return to another ice age."

The New York Times (May 21, 1975): "A major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable. . . . (It is) well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

What "bill of particulars" are you looking for?

Lots, but to start with: what, precisely, would have to happen in the climate for you to believe that this scare is overstated?

Weather examples like Katrina are not the only evidence.

Granted! My only wish is that your side would stop using every example of hot, warm, wet, cold, and average as proof of your conclusions.

There are rigorous scientific studies--the IPCC reports alone are over 800 pages long.

And the IPCC predicts an increase of one degrees Farenheit by the end of the century, and two inches of ocean rise. Number one, both those conclusions amount to rounding errors, and two, even if they were true, I'd take them both and walk away.

Is your real problem here with scientists and not liberals?

My problem is when either group behaves like the other.