Climate-change skeptics get hearing.

At a hearing chaired by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) on December 6, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works heard testimony from climate scientists on the subject of global warming. The hearing, which according to Senator Inhofe would "examine the media's role in presenting the science of climate change," was billed by much of the media as a meeting of global-warming skeptics, even though it took testimony from scientists on both sides of the debate.

Among the "skeptics" presenting information to the Senate committee was Dr. Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist and environmental scientist at Australia's James Cook University. Carter pointed out that, in his opinion, the media have "propagated an alarmist cause for climate change, and they have certainly failed to convey to the public both the degree of uncertainty that is characteristic of climate science and many essential facts that are relevant to considerations of human causation."

Carter, a voice not often heard in the global-warming debate, pointed to a number of inconvenient facts that call the standard view of global warming into question, including:

* Ice core records show temperature changes preceding C[O.sub.2] changes by "hundreds of years or more."

* Data from Greenland proves that the current warm period "corresponds to a cyclic warming peak within a ~1500 year periodicity of probable solar origin ... and was cooler than the preceding Minoan and Mediaeval Warm Periods."

* Current warming in Antarctica "is as much as 5 deg. C cooler than were recent interglacial climate optimums."

* Current warming lies within documented natural variations and is not exceptional as global-warming alarmists claim.

* Temperatures are no longer increasing. Data collected in the U.K. show "temperature at the Earth's surface has flatlined since 1998. Temperature in the troposphere is virtually unchanged since 1979 once El Ninos and volcanic eruptions are taken into account."

One of those supporting the view that global warming is a real menace caused by human activity was Harvard scientist Daniel Schrag, who made a simple statement dismissing those who, like Carter, contradict the orthodox view. "There is no serious debate about whether the Earth will warm as carbon dioxide levels increase over this century--it will," he said in a statement condemning dissent.

Unfortunately, with the new Democrat-controlled Congress about to take over, it's the ideologues like Schrag who will likely help determine the shape of future climate change policy while conscientious scientists like Dr. Carter and many others take a back seat.