The current uproar over the posture of the Bush Administration on global warming and, most recently, on power-plant emissions vividly illustrates the political hypocrisy and opportunism imbuing debates on environmental issues. Take first global warming. The charge that the current phase of global warming can be attributed to greenhouse gases generated by humans and their livestock is an article of faith among liberals as sturdy as is missile defense among the conservative crowd. The Democrats have seized on the issue of global warming as indicative of President Bush's willful refusal to confront a global crisis that properly agitates all of America's major allies. Almost daily, the major green groups reap rich political capital (and donations) on the issue.

Yet the so-called anthropogenic origin of global warming remains entirely nonproven. Back in the spring of this year, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which now has a huge stake in arguing the "caused by humans" thesis, admitted in its summary that there could be a one-in-three chance its multitude of experts are wrong. A subsequent report, issued under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, is ambivalent to the point of absurdity. An initial paragraph boldly asserting the caused-by-humans line is confounded a few pages later by far more cautious paragraphs admitting that the thesis is speculative and that major uncertainty rules on the role played in climate equations by water vapor and aerosols.

It's nothing new to say the earth is getting warmer. I myself think it is, and has been for a long, long time. On my shelf is an excellent volume put out in 1941 by the Department of Agriculture called Climate and Man, which contains a chapter acknowledging "global warming" (that same phrase) and hailing it as a benign trend that will return the earth to the normalcy in climate it enjoyed several hundred thousand years ago.

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