Our former governor recently had her name on this op-ed piece in the New York Times calling for action on carbon-dioxide emissions.

The piece nicely illustrates two of my major objections to the "consensus" argument advanced by the alarmists.

The first is that the consensus among scientists extends only to agreement that CO-2 has a measurable, but minor, role as a greenhouse gas. To get to the apocalyptic scenarios endorsed by Al Gore, among others, you must make all sorts of unsubstantiated predictions about cloud activity. As I noted here, that question is very complex and the issue is far from settled.

My second obection is that the alarmists tend to rely on that alleged consensus rather than doing the research necessary to understand the issue.

Christe Whitman certainly hadn't when she took over the reins at the Environmental Protection Agency in 2001.

As I wrote at the time, Whitman made the mistake of confusing the climate-change issue with the ozone issue in an interview with the Times just before taking office. Here's an excerpt from a column I did back then:

Whitman is far from the only alarmist to make that mistake. The same error was made by the leading Democratic legislator in the area of climate change, Assemblyman John McKeon of West Orange.

Even though McKeon sponsored a bill in 2007 that enrolled New Jersey in the failed Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, as recently as last year he still confused the climate-change issue with the ozone issue.

Consider the recent Times op-ed in that light:

Inarguably? Nonsense. It's one thing to say that it might be a good idea to reduce carbon emissions to avoid the risk of climate change. But there's no proof that will actually work.

Meanwhile we know for certain that banning such cheap energy sources as coal will make electricity rates higher and harm competitiveness with such countries as China and India that do not subscribe to climate-change hysteria.

And permitting the president to act unilaterally to effectively ban coal sets a terrible precedent. These four should have stopped with that sentence about a carbon tax. If Barack Obama would push for such a tax combined with a reduction in income-tax rates, then the Republicans might come along.

Alas, Obama and the Democrats are committed to class warfare. They don't want to do anything that would actually lower taxes on the top 2 percent.

If the climate-change crowd really cared about the issue, they'd push for a carbon tax that cuts income taxes on all Americans, including the rich.

Of course, if they really cared about carbon, they'd be pushing nuclear power, the sole source of massive amounts of carbon-free energy.

Below is another column I did on the subject back in 2001. That was before I had a blog, so this has not been online before. Note the many mistakes by politicians that went unchallenged. Also note the way in which a Washington Post columnist actually boasts about his ignorance.

It was headlined "It's not the air; it's the airheads"