In sum, if the president were truly devoted to science, he woud have cited the need for California to increase its storage capacity, factor in its growing population in all questions of water use, and accept that public policy must give food production priority over returning the natural landscape to conditions that obtained when just a few million people inhabited the state. Instead, he abides by faith-based theories, in deductive fashion.

Just as the Church became invested in refuting Galileo for obvious reasons — a cosmos not revolving around a human-inhabited earth might lessen the majesty of our own creator and, by extension, the Church hierarchy — so too global warming is caught up in political orthodoxy. And it involves billions of dollars in research moneys, careers in academia and government, and lucrative advocacy of the sort engaged in by Al Gore, who has had an unfortunate tendency first to alarm us about global warming and then to step in to offer his profit-making remedies to avert it.

There is a great deal of irony in these recent debates over science. Barack Obama came into office blasting faith-based thinking and promising to restore the primacy of scientific inquiry. But he and the other supporters of global warming do not welcome vigorous debate, and they cite as proven fact theories that have a disturbing tendency to advance both political agendas and lucrative careers.