If you can't read the science properly, the science can't help you.

Wall Street Journal columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief, Bret Stephens, gets all religious in his attempt to dismiss global warming as a problem.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

Well, at least we can see where he's going. Much of the science has been discredited. His proof?

NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954.

Nice bit of cherry picking. NASA is quite clear on the adjustments they made. Begrudgingly? I suppose if pointing out that the straw Stephens is clutching represents 1.6% of the Earth's surface area (the contiguous 48 US states) is viewed as a reluctant fact. They also pointed out that globally 1998 was warmer than any other year in the 20th Century. Stephens also omits another fact - 2005 was the hottest year globally ever recorded. And 2007 is tied with 1998 as the second warmest years globally.

One would think that using the title Global Warming as Mass Neurosis, Stephens might want to take a more global view.

Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.

Another cherry. The data collected from project ARGO measures the upper layer of the water column. And the upper layer has indeed cooled since 2003 in the top 20% of the global average depth. In fact, I recently read a study which corrected the temperature rise data in the rest of the water column to reflect a short period of cooling at even greater depths. But Stephens either didn't read everything pertinent or is being intentionally dishonest. He totally bypassed two salient points.

1. The average temperature rise in the upper 800 meters of the ocean has been 0.16 degrees F in the ten year period between 1993 and 2003. The cooling between 2003 and 2005 has been 0.055 degrees F. That is about one-third of the overall heat gain over ten years and one-fifth of the heat rise recorded since 1955.

2. Sudden decadal decreases in ocean temperatures are not unusual. In fact, there was a period of sudden cooling of ocean surfaces between 1980 and 1983. By 1984 the cooling had ended and warming started again. The overall trend is warming.

Stephens also ignores another fact. Despite the short period of ocean surface cooling, sea levels are still rising. That suggests that ice melt and run-off are having a more significant effect on sea levels than expansion due to warming.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years.

That is, I'll admit to one thing and then blow your doors off with a revelation. Well, not so much. Stephens left out another set of facts. In the same place Stephens says the ice-sheet is expanding, the Bellinghausen and Amundsen Seas are experiencing massive losses of ice as the glaciers of the western Antarctic ice sheet melt. The loss of glacier ice, and the resultant destruction of the sea ice in the region is of considerably greater significance than the expansion of other areas.

Stephens' generalization is to suggest that the two polar ice caps are the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Arctic is a landlocked ocean; The Antarctic is an island surrounded by ocean. While the Arctic has thick multi-year ice, the Antarctic has much thinner ice which constantly changes its area. In the Antarctic summer the sea ice recedes to one-sixth of the area it occupies in winter. There is also the fact that Arctic ice melted from below before we were aware of it. Research has only just started to measure the Antarctic sea ice mass.

At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades.

How many decades? The truth is it was the coldest global winter since 2001. In the US 2008 February average temperatures were 0.2 degrees F higher than the 20th Century average of 34.7 degrees F and a full 2 degrees F warmer than February 2007. The global average was 0.68 degrees F higher than the 20th Century mean of 53.8 degrees F.

In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

It figures that Stephens would suck that one up. However, the confidence in their experimental forecast seems to have waned. Other climate scientists see the forecast as seriously flawed. In fact, they've challenged the German climate modelers to a wager. The Germans have yet to accept.

Let's not forget that this kind of prediction has happened once before and, as we now know, was completely wrong. Worse though, is that people like Stephens use the 1970s The Ice Age Is Coming! hype as an argument not to believe climate scientists about anything. However, as John Fleck and William Connolley point out, during the time period that everyone was hyperventilating at the thought of Earth becoming a giant ice cube, they discovered that, out of 71 climatology articles published between 1965 and 1979 the dominant prediction was that of warming with only 7 of those articles predicting an impending ice age. 20 articles were neutral and 44 predicted warming as a result of increased greenhouse gas emissions.

It is at this point that Stephens really falls off his donkey.

The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations. The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification.

Finally. A characterization. Never mind that. Stephens' big bitch is that somehow capitalism is being blamed. That he chooses to label all those concerned with the future of the global climate as "leftists" he ignores the fact that some of the greatest contributions to increased GHG emissions in the last century came from the Soviet Union and Red China. In short, Stephens is whining that his ideology is under assault and that it's political. What he doesn't comprehend is that a majority of those who sit among the scientific data aren't suggesting that industry and enterprise stop; just that it change how it does things.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. [...] And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Who's fear-mongering now? The truth is, most people want real solutions. By Stephens' reckoning all who view global warming as a problem want everyone to turn into 60s Earth-Children. He then punctuates it with a genuinely disconnected hyperbole. What he doesn't examine, because it doesn't suit his narrative, is whether those concerned with global warming would prefer to change their lifestyles or whether they would be happier to employ technology and industry to engage solutions and maintain their comfort - without the exhaust. If it was not for the short-sightedness of the likes of Stephens we might have advanced technology decades ago which rendered the internal combustion engine obsolete.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

What a load of horse shit. No one is suggesting that - except Stephens. Simply put, from the start of the Industrial Revolution until the 1970s we really didn't have much knowledge of global warming or the effects of industrial pollution. Save from regional effects such as smog and chemical dumping, most people were absolutely clueless as to any long-term damage being done.

What Stephens is describing as some kind of guilt over industrial accomplishments is actually more of an Oops! We'd better fix that. In fact, most who view global warming as a problem would like to see changes made to emissions while remaining prosperous. That means actually working towards meaningful solutions and harnessing human innovation and ingenuity.

But in Stephens' imaginary world those things are clearly dead.