Via Legal Insurrection, I’ve learned that 56 newspapers are collaborating to run a common front-page editorial titled Copenhagen climate change conference: ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions…. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

To many involved in the global warming debate, it’s not really about science; it’s about “social justice” and “fairness”. I also posted here about how global warming has become a pretext for attacking capitalism and furthering a socialist agenda — a claim I had dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory for quite a while until I saw some pretty strong evidence.

But that’s just the media and various environmental/political groups. What about the scientists themselves?

We know that scientists are overwhelmingly liberal. We also know that scientists are human beings, susceptible to the same worldview-driven biases as the rest of us. (See, e.g., “When Good Thinking Goes Bad: How Your Brain Can Have A Mind Of Its Own” by Todd Riniolo for some examples of highly regarded scientists — Albert Einstein and Isaac Asimov, for instance — who held indefensible politically-motivated beliefs, even in the face of strong contradictory evidence.) Therefore, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves how objective the climate science really is?