According to the 2001 National Academies of Science Report on Climate Change, "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities," and, it continues, "Global warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological impacts by the end of this century."

On the December 10, 2004 segment of the television show 20/20, ABC news correspondent John Stossel praised Michael Crichton's State of Fear, which purports to expose concern over global warming as a media scare perpetrated by Hollywood liberals and self-serving environmentalists. He offered no countervailing view (from, say, a scientist), instead interviewing a woman ready to pee her pants in fear after seeing the movie The Day After Tomorrow - presumably representative of the hysteria on the issue. The rest of the segment was devoted to lionizing the "brave" Mr. Crichton for taking great personal risk by publishing his narrow, unscientific viewpoint. Now it seems that Mr. Stossel is ready to jump on board with Mr. Crichton as a debunker of the global warming "myth."

Mr. Stossel was interviewed on April 8 by Brooke Gladstone on NPR's On the Media:

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think that scientists are just another interest group, representing their benefactors, or is there a point at which a scientific consensus is something incontrovertible?

John Stossel: Well, [laughs] "incontrovertible" is a big word, but a scientific consensus is what I think reporters should go with, absolutely. But, what I've tried to point out in Give Me a Break is that, when I started reporting, I just took the scientists at their word. I didn't realize that, while they tend to believe in what they say, they're also subconsciously aware that they're not going to get another big grant, or they're not going to get interviewed by Good Morning America, if they don't find a problem. And I routinely found scientists finding big problems, big worries from dioxin to pesticide residues when good scientists said, you know, it's not that risky.

Gladstone: So you don't believe that there is an international scientific consensus that global warming poses a danger.

Stossel: Well, anything can pose "a danger." The question is how big a danger? Is it the crisis that I keep hearing about? And the scientists that I talk to say we don't know that that's true.

Gladstone: The scientists that you talk to say that you don't know that's true, but the vast majority of scientists that have been convened on these international panels, who have won Nobel Prizes, believe that it is true - that global warming poses a serious danger and requires some action.

Stossel: The vast majority have agreed with that? I do not believe that is the case.

Gladstone: You don't believe that is the case. The consensus seems to be clear. Why don't you believe it?

Stossel: Because scientists tell me that the people writing the alarmist reports do not reflect the majority of scientists who really understand it; that the way you characterize it is not the way I've heard good scientists characterize it; and that the idea and the tone of voice you use is very telling - it's saying "Yes, there's a crisis. How can you refute that? You're such a jerk."

Gladstone: [laughs] I'm sorry if my tone conveyed that. According to the scientists that you've spoken to, there is no immediate danger posed by global warming that requires action.

Stossel: Correct.

Gladstone: In December, you featured novelist Michael Crichton on 20/20, and you praised him for contradicting something most people believe and fear. You went on to say that environmental organizations are fomenting false fears in order to promote agendas and raise money. Why use a fiction writer to refute the scientific community?

Stossel: Because he's famous, and he's interesting, and he's smart, and he writes books that lots of people read, and I could interview the scientists for 20/20, but more people will pay attention when this particular smart fiction writer says it.

Two things jump out from this interview: first, celebrity and fame seem to count for more than qualifications and credentials to Mr. Stossel. Second, the tactic of stubbornly asserting that the false is, in fact, true ("I do not believe that is the case"), despite all evidence to the contrary, seems to be popular with the right wing. Time magazine cover girl Ann Coulter tried the same defense after ludicrously suggesting that Canada had sent troops to Vietnam:

Ann Coulter: Canada used to be one of our most loyal friends and vice-versa. I mean Canada sent troops to Vietnam - was Vietnam less containable and more of a threat than Saddam Hussein?

Bob McKeown: Canada didn't send troops to Vietnam.

Coulter: I don't think that's right.

McKeown: Canada did not send troops to Vietnam.

Coulter: Indochina?

McKeown: Uh no. Canada. . . second World War of course. Korea. Yes. Vietnam No.

Coulter: I think you're wrong.

McKeown: No, took a pass on Vietnam.

Coulter: I think you're wrong.

McKeown: No, Australia was there, not Canada.

Coulter: I think Canada sent troops.

McKeown: No.

Coulter: Well. I'll get back to you on that.

McKeown (in voice-over): Coulter never got back to us -- but for the record, like Iraq, Canada sent no troops to Vietnam.

To Stossel and Coulter, what matters is not so much what is true or not, but what one can get away with saying. This, of course, is the very essence of bullshit.

What is bullshit, after all? According to Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, it is neither fish nor fowl. In his essay "On Bullshit," Prof. Frankfurt states that bullshiters certainly aren't honest, but neither are they liars, given that the liar and the honest man are linked in their common, if not identical, regard for the truth. "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Prof. Frankfurt writes. "A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."

The bullshit artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Prof. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to bullshit "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."

And this makes him potentially more harmful than any liar, Prof. Frankfurt writes, because any culture, and he means this culture rife with bullshit, is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance. "All that is solid," Marx once wrote, "melts into air."

So let me review for a minute - in this one post, I managed to ridicule Michael Crichton, John Stossel and Ann Coulter, quote Harry Frankfurt and Karl Marx, and use the word "bullshit" several times with a straight face. Good! I think I'm ready to hit the "Publish Post" button . . .