The conclusion to Mark Steyn’s full testimony to the American Senate on climate change.

Climate alarmism is going nowhere. The two-decade global-warming pause, which no late 1990s climate model foresaw, led the public to doubt Big Climate’s confident predictions for the future. In response, federal bodies such as NOAA and NASA have adjusted the past to make the present appear hotter, and thus supposedly demonstrated that in fact there is no such “pause”. As a result, public opinion, which no longer trusts the Big Climate enforcers to tell them what the climate will be like in 2050, now no longer trusts them to tell them what it was like in 1950. A recent poll found that, notwithstanding the urgings of the President and the Secretary of State and others, only three per cent of Americans regard climate change as their major concern. Three per cent. There is your 97 per cent consensus, gentlemen.

At exactly the time when climate science needs to acknowledge its own failings, and the uncertainties of which Dr Curry speaks, and the inability of cartoon climatology and fraudulent gimmicks like the hockey stick to capture the complexities of the planet’s climate system, a narrow unrepresentative group of activists is demanding ever more brutal penalties against those who refuse to toe the line.

There is certainly a role for the state to play in this – not in prosecuting climate dissenters under RICO laws or in dumping taxpayer money into unwatchable propaganda musicals, or in having feckless lethargic judges in the District of Columbia reward serial plaintiffs for nuisance suits, but rather in standing firm for the most expansive definition of free speech, which is vital to scientific inquiry and sorely overdue in this particular field, and against the
abuse of government funds, which has been disastrous for it.

UPDATE: Steyn’s full statement to the Senate. A must read for anyone who feels in command of a subject. Anger and irony are an amazing combination with also having command of the facts. Via Rafe in the comments.