The Wall Street Journal is taking a lot of heat for an op-ed published on Jan. 27 that reassures its readers that there's no need to panic over global warming. The piece was signed by 16 scientists who say they don't subscribe to conventional wisdom that climate change is real, and that it's man-made.

Fair enough.

But where the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., gets into hot water is that it earlier refused to publish the scientific viewpoint of 255 scientists from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that supported the existence of climate change.

The fact that the Wall Street Journal published the position long associated with so-called climate change deniers, then refused to publish the facts presented by a college of climate scientists, only gives fuel to those who believe that Murdoch – founder of Fox News Channel – is using the opinion pages of the Journal to push his right-wing agenda.

The Academy’s letter ultimately was published by Science magazine.

Those who put their faith in established scientific methods say the evidence that climate change is occurring – that global warming is real, and that human behavior is responsible for at least part of it – find it maddening that denial of climate change has been able to gain such traction among the American public. What’s particularly baffling is that the arguments against climate change are grounded not in science (where studies might have come up with conflicting data) but rather ideology and politics.

The arguments against climate change are remarkably similar, in fact, to the arguments against the concept of evolution made by people who believe in creation or the substitute theory of "intelligent design." In fact, the two are so similar that the National Center for Science Education – founded to fight the teaching of creationism in public school science classes – added a second topic for the first time in its 30-year history: Climate change.

When balancing arguments, a good starting point is to size up each side’s motivations. Scientists, as a general rule, are motivated by truth and facts. In this case, climate change deniers are motivated by what, exactly?