Global-warming alarmists try to freeze out skeptics.

ITEM: In the Boston Globe for December 21, 2006, U.S. Representative Marry Meehan (D-Mass.) and Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, wrote a piece called "Making Noise on Global Warming." The pair maintained: "There are few matters of international importance that could have more dire consequences than being silent about the dangers of global warming. Rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, an increase in severe weather, from hurricanes to heat waves--the effects of global warming are evident all around us.... Despite these troubling signs, government scientists and experts on climate change have been stopped by President Bush and administration officials from reporting their scientific findings on the link between global warming and human activity."

The authors concluded: "Instead of silencing government climate experts, the federal government should take a cue from states like Massachusetts and become an active leader and partner in efforts to combat global warming."

ITEM: BBC News reported on October 31, 2006: "The world cannot afford to wait before tackling climate change, the UK prime minister has warned. A report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%. But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, the 700-page study says. Tony Blair said the Stern Review showed that scientific evidence of global warming was 'overwhelming' and its consequences 'disastrous.'"

ITEM: Former Vice President Al Gore, reported the Associated Press on December 17, "says there is a 'temptation' to suppress scientific findings that don't agree with policy and urges scientists to take a more active role in communicating research with the public. 'Earth science has been singled out' and ignored by government, particularly work dealing with climate change, he said." The wire-service account continued, as published in the Knoxville News Sentinel: "'There is a greater temptation to ignore inconvenient truths, to set aside knowledge that might challenge prevailing policy,' said Gore, who was greeted with a standing ovation."

CORRECTION: It is truly astonishing that the warmaholics who portend worldwide catastrophes around the next bend, and whose every alarmist warning is trumpeted by the mass media and echoed by major political spokesmen, can pretend they are the victims of a silencing campaign.

In fact, in the matter of global warming, muzzling and ridiculing are generally reserved I to the skeptical analysts who won't fall into lock step. Remember it was Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), both global-warming acolytes, who not long ago sent a letter to ExxonMobil's top executive strongly demanding that the company cease funding any group that doesn't buy into the latest global-warming theory. The letter's message was, as pointed out by the Wall Street Journal, "Start toeing the Senators' line on climate change, or else."

Free speech and balance are apparently outmoded concepts for true believers of the faith of global warming. Consider one such outspoken promoter, Ross Gelbspan, an author with a long newspaper career with the Philadelphia Bulletin, Boston Globe, and Washington Post. It was Gelbspan who instructed an audience in the nation's capital: "Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming. They have a responsibility not to report what those scientists say."