EVEN ALARMISTS SHOULD WELCOME THE OPPORTUNITY TO SETTLE THIS ISSUE.

might reach 0.5 C by the year 2100. That is a minuscule result from what would be a Herculean and prohibitively costly effort.

People who inveigh against the imminent dangers of climate change are undeterred that so many of their dire predictions have proven to be wrong. All Arctic ice was supposed to have disappeared by last year, but hasn’t; an expected rise in extreme weather events has not materialized; and the global temperatures that we were supposed to see increase during the beginning of this century are still where they were nearly two decades ago. Obviously, there is a lot we do not know about climate science.

We hear repeatedly that 97 per cent of scientists agree that humans are endangering the climate. However, scientists are reluctant to express disagreement because of a justifiable concern their careers will be seriously compromised by an intolerance of dissent. More fundamentally, science and consensus are unrelated. Scientific theories can only be verified by repeatable experiments, not popularity contests. Indeed, great scientific breakthroughs usually contradict accepted wisdom; it’s why they’re called breakthroughs. When people claim the science is settled, they do not define what is allegedly settled, creating the implication that the entire field is, which is demonstrably untrue.

Skeptics believe the left is using the global-warming scare to engineer a massive government incursion in the economy. That’s plausible, but it isn’t even necessary to worry about possible motives. What is necessary is to guard against any attempt to manipulate research to achieve a desired result.

Unfortunately, that can happen. A whistleblower at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) testified that a report from the organization last year ignored data substantiating a slowdown in global warming in order to influence negotiators at