@ Sully:

A sublime verse, Brother Laureate. I have to say, The Big Kahuna's Assize would be one honkin' name for a rock band.

So, anyway, this one is obvious: Put me down as a Daniel Craig Skeptic.

Beer mugs!

I think it's kind of a truism that we should be discussing the "AGW issue" in political debate. But unfortunately, the reality or unreality of AGW is inherent to the political issue. Proponents on each side are always going to bring up the assertions they consider believable as part of the argument.

I notice that you speak of "GW," and I don't know if that's deliberate or not. But "GW" is a different proposition from "AGW" in all the ways that matter. Without the "A," there is not even a superficial basis for assuming any clarity on what is or ought to be "done about it." If there's no "A" in the proposition, then at the very least, there's nothing for man to stop doing.

I don't agree with the characterization "denialist," incidentally. Denial implies refusing to acknowledge something, or categorically proclaiming it to be untrue or invalid. "Skeptics" is a more accurate term. Five years ago, I was actually less skeptical of both GW and AGW than I am today. My skepticism has grown with my knowledge of the topic; but it could begin receding again if empirical evidence were to start pointing more incontrovertibly in the direction of GW or AGW.

(Just to clarify, since this question is obvious: when I say "GW," I refer to the theory that the earth is warming on a seminal and unprecedented one-way trend, as opposed to simply being in a cyclical warming trend of the kind documented in various research disciplines.)

@ Barbara:

You know, I can't shake the prejudice induced in me against Craig (who is, admittedly, a brooding hunk) by the following events:

1. The fact that he was picked to be the new bond over Clive Owen, who as far as I'm concerned is way hunkier, and comes already programmed with the accent Ian Fleming endowed his Bond with.

2. Craig's disclosure, while Quantum of Solace was in filming, of his discomfort with firearms. It just seems so Johnny Depp of him. Haven't been able to view him in the same light since. What can I say, I guess I'm epistemically vacuum-sealed on that one.

@ CK MacLeod:

In the interest of keeping the epistemic aperture open as wide as possible, I think it's important to point out the closure inherent in assertions of this kind:

Levin and his partner in epistemic crime Andy McCarthy almost fall over themselves demonstrating their ideological closure. It is clear from word one, or nearly, that they would remain uninterested in global warming per se even up to the moment that the atmosphere itself exploded in flame. They have already decided that they’d rather the world came to an end than see a virtual world government telling people like them where to set their thermostats or how fast to drive. They would fight that to the death, just as during the Cold War they would have been prepared to see the world’s great cities incinerated and the skies blackened with radioactive soot rather than give into SOVIET DOMINATION.

Certainly Levin and McCarthy have an a priori prejudice against a "virtual world government" with the powers you suggest. But their argument is actually that we don't face the alternative of either accepting that government or going up in the smoke of an overwarmed atmosphere.

It isn't either a moderate or a "scientific" approach to denigrate people for not accepting that which is far from proven. Levin and McCarthy only look extreme if we accept the premise that our alternatives are world government or incineration. There is no empirical evidence that points to that; there are only limited sets of observations, brokered by fallible humans, and theories that are still in testing.

There is also, of course, the unexamined assumption that whatever we conclude in 2010, even with the best will and methods, is absolutely valid and will remain so over time. Nothing in the history of human science should lead us rely on that assumption. We've been wrong about everything since we began keeping written records of our endeavors; we get to more right answers through iterations of failure and disproven theories.

Levin and McCarthy are saying that we haven't established anything about what our climate's doing that should trump the national-level guarantee of liberties. What is the evidence that we have?

@ narciso:

Hey, Zardoz is a cool cult classic. Y'all messin' with all my cultural touchstones here. How often do you get to see Sean Connery nancing around in a foofy get-up like that?

Speaking of ridiculous fictional treatments of the Ice Age that was impending back in the 1970s, who else remembers Colleen McCullough's A Creed for the Third Millennium? I think that was mid-80s. The cognoscenti in Alarmist Theory circles were already moving on to planetary meltdown, but the goodhearted Aussie lass, mega-selling author of Thorn Birds, took a game late-in-the-day whack at depicting an Ice Age falling on the northeastern US. I mainly remember the book as being full of colloquialisms Yanks don't use.

@ Barbara:

Oh, c'mon, Barbara. I like "immanentize the eschaton"! You can have so much fun with it. "Epistemic closure" promises plenty too.

Although I think I would say the biggest problem of the 21st century is the great yawning void between epistemologic closure among one set of folks, and the utterly unclosable epistemologic aperture characteristic of another.