This fellow's overheated I do not want to get into a debate about global warming. But I feel it's necessary to point out this piece on the possibility of a coming Ice Age and how misleading most global warming activism is:

A good environmental scare needs two ingredients. The first is impending catastrophe. The second is a suitable culprit to blame. In the second case, the ice age fails and global warming is gloriously successful. It is not the destruction itself of Sodom and Gomorrah that makes the story so appealing but the fact that they were destroyed because they were so sinful. ... There are two facts in the scare. First, it is true that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas — one which traps heat on Earth. (Without it, the Earth would be too cold for life.) Second, it is true that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. The rest is guesswork. ... The computer models that the global warmers now use are ludicrously oversimplified, and it is no surprise that they have made one wrong prediction after another.

True. But the article, which is otherwise pretty solid, misses one important fact: The practical effect of "global warming" could actually be to usher in the very Ice Age the author is pretending to be worried about. "Global warming" is a misnomer. What's clear is that small shifts in the Earth's climate can have drastic and unexpected results, as recently noted in "A Brain for All Seasons" and elsewhere:

Gradual warming, paradoxically, can trigger abrupt cooling. Many climate changes are not gradual affairs, like turning up a thermostat or ramping up a dimmer switch. A gradual greenhouse warming over several centuries is not how things usually happen. As when tilting a table, there's a point when things start to slide off, and a tipping point when the table flips into a sideways mode. Abrupt (by which I mean the year-to-decade time frame) climate changes are more like a light switch that suddenly, at some pressure, flips into an alternative state. Just as when a power surge injures a fluorescent light tube and it starts flickering between bright and dim, so warming can cause air temperature to start abruptly flickering between warm and cool—and so produce a madhouse century.

Does this sound a bit Ehrlichesque? Um, yes. But the science is there -- previous "cold flips" and warmings have been triggered (or at least heralded) by tiny changes in temperature. As the Spectator article says, "for heaven’s sake, let’s start by telling the whole truth and giving all of the facts." And alluding to The Tipping Point, while we're at it.