It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on thescience of global warming actually indicated that we do not face anunimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures toprotect human civilization as we know it. Of course, we would still need to deal with the nationalsecurity risks of our growing dependence on a global oil marketdominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of theworld, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions ofdollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would stilltrail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solarpower, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — themost important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.  But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have toworry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as acriminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clearwarnings that their fate was in our hands. We could insteadcelebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving thatevery major National Academy of Sciences report on climate changehad simply made a huge mistake. I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were anillusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we arecourting has not been changed by the discovery of at least twomistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work overthe last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing todump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hoursinto the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in agentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded,merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R.Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of thee-mails.