And then there’s the issue of global warming, which required something of a fifth estate to get journalists to even mention skepticism of the most far-fetched claims.

Mark Steyn writes that “‘climate change’ is not only a scientific scandal but also a massive journalistic failure.” The entire post is worth reading, but Steyn looks at one case in particular:

Like all the poodles of the environmental beat, Margot O’Neill repeats those magic words “peer review” every couple of paragraphs like a talisman to ward off evil deniers. But, in the course of invoking the phrase “peer review”, she never bothers to look at whether the IPCC actually does it. By contrast, without benefit of the resources of a national TV news operation plus salary and benefits, lone blogger Donna Laframboise did a couple of text searches on the IPCC report and discovered multiple predictions of doom – on Himalayan glacier melt and much else – resting not on peer-reviewed science but merely on activist groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.

H/t: Instapundit

“The latest setback for global warm-mongers is a probe conducted by the British Guardian newspaper, which discovered a prominent climate scientist ’sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.’”

To quote Charlie Brown, Good grief!

A bipartisan trio of House members on Tuesday introduced a bill to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Reps. Ike Skelton (D-MO), Collin C. Peterson (D-MN), and Jo Anne Emerson (R-MO) introduced H.R. 4572, which would also amend the 2007 Energy Bill to stop EPA from calculating land use changes in foreign countries in determining American renewable fuels policy, and would broaden the definition of renewable biomass.

“Simply put, we cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats at EPA,” Skelton said. “America’s energy and environmental policies should be set by Congress.”

As Mark Tapscott of the indispensable Washington Examiner writes:

As Energy and Environment Climatewire’s Jessica Leber reports today, the Obama administration has proposed a modest cut of $300 million from EPA’s overall $10 billion budget for 2011, the amounts allocated for global warming related regulatory and other activities is up, to $1.1 billion, or about 12 percent of the agency’s expenditures.

A total of $56 million will go to global warming regulations, while another $169 million of the $1.1 billion total will be spent on efforts directly aimed at reducing the greenhouse gases global warming advocates like former Vice President Al Gore claim are responsible for causing dangerous temperature increases in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Ugg. To the rare few Americans who maintain a balanced view of politics, it has to be clear by now that the forces of global warming alarmism are in this for a quasi-religious cause and the possibility to control billions or trillions of money — and probably both.

We think it’s too early to pop the champagne corks, but it’s certainly looking good. Who knows, maybe we can put this blog on the shelf to collect dust.

Here’s a reminder of our hope/prediction from a few months ago.