Free Republic

On Tuesday night about 1,100 people participated in a sold-out global warming debate that, in the end, turned downtown Toronto's new concert hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music into a microcosm of a larger tranformation that is sweeping the world. The debate pitted two well known global warming activists of international repute against two well-known skeptics. The skeptics won, shifting the audience's support away from the drastic global warming action demanded by activists and toward the moderate reponse of the skeptics, a move that is rapidly becoming a trend everywhere. If global warming is a problem -- and many...

One of the striking features of how concern over global warming has risen to the top of our political agenda is the extraordinary unanimity with which it has been taken up by our political establishment.Not only have our main political parties unquestioningly accepted the more extreme claims of the threat posed by global warming, as exemplified by the Treasury's Stern Review or Al Gore's alarmist film. Our politicians have similarly endorsed without a murmur all the steps now being taken to avert this predicted catastrophe - which, if carried through, can only mean a dramatic transformation in our way of...