Clive Crook at The Atlantic posted a piece yesterday that seemed most promising based on the headline: “Climategate and the Big Green Lie”. And it wasn’t bad really; yet the opening made it clear that it would never live up to the headline’s promise. It also made clear, once more, just what we’re dealing with in this climate change business.

The author has to remind us where he stands, as he puts it, in order to demonstrate that he is a decent person who of course takes the global warming religion seriously, and doesn’t really doubt it like those wicked heretical “deniers”. No, of course not…he’s just concerned that some people on his side have been a bit naughty in the way they’ve fought for truth and justice.

Such bowing to orthodoxy and denunciation of heresy—even if thoroughly insincere—is simply the price of admission to the debate these days, if you wish to be taken seriously by polite society. It’s all the demonstration one needs to establish that the bien-pensant segment of Western society is once again in the grip of a pseudo-religious (and, once again, not a little crypto-Marxist) delusion.

In the ’70s we were all going to die because of global cooling. In the ’00s we were all going to die because of global warming. In the 2030s, I’m sure, people will laugh at how silly we all were back in the ’70s and ’00s…while they fret about the undeniable fact that all of us are going to die because of global temperatures staying too much the same.

That is, if that decade’s version of the deadly flu pandemic doesn’t get us all first. (We’ve had avian, and swine at least twice…maybe it will be the donkey flu next? The llama flu?)