Once upon a time, the media believed in the open exchange of opinions regarding public policy. People who had doubts about one or another claim put forward by activists and crusaders could express those thoughts without fear of censure or ridicule. And, to be fair, that is still the case in many areas of social policy.

But there’s one hot-button issue on which virtually no dissent is allowed: climate change. In a style reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, people disagreeing with any element of the agenda pursued by Al Gore and his climate catastrophists have been derided as “deniers,” a term clearly intended to equate dissent with mental illness, if not post hoc complicity in atrocities (as in “Holocaust denier”). “Fifteen per cent of the people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number still believe the Earth is flat,” Gore says. “They all get together on a Saturday night and party with the global-warming deniers.”

While only a few hotheads have proposed a physical gulag for the deniers, the mainstream press has created a media gulag. Former Boston Globe editor Ross Gelbspan urged the media to do just that in July 2000: “Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming, they have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say,” he told a Washington audience. Analyses of media coverage show that the three big U.S. television networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) have taken Gelbspan’s message to heart: in the last half of 2007, only 20 percent of stories about climate change mentioned skepticism or dissenting viewpoints. Essentially, climate catastrophism is treated as fact.

The dissidents often have much more impressive scientific qualifications than the climate catastrophists.

Fortunately, not all journalists have bowed to the politically correct climate crusade. Lawrence Solomon, a columnist for Canada’s National Post—and the victim of an earlier smear campaign—decided to ask who these “deniers” really are and what they really believe. What he found is telling: “Among all the deniers I have profiled,” Solomon writes, “I have never encountered one who disputes that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect, or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.... The arguments are all about how powerful the effect is, especially when considered in combination with other factors, various feedback mechanisms both negative and positive, and other influences that might or might not overwhelm the effect of CO2.” In other words, Solomon found that the “deniers” are, in fact, not in denial at all. They are merely dissidents from the political orthodoxy of climate catastrophism.

Gore would have you believe that these dissidents are marginal players in the scientific community. Solomon shows otherwise. In his new book, The Deniers (Richard Vigilante, $27.95), which is a compilation of his National Post columns, Solomon profiles 34 global warming dissidents who boast impeccable scientific credentials and, in some cases, mind-boggling accomplishments in the field of climatology. By my calculations (supplemented with a bit of Googling), Solomon’s “deniers” have published nearly 4,000 articles in peer-reviewed journals and well over 100 books. A list of their academic honors and high-level appointments would be longer than this entire review. The dissidents often have much more impressive qualifications than the climate catastrophists.

In recent years, I too have been slandered as a global warming “denier” in the blogosphere, despite having never denied manmade climate change. I have felt the urge—as Solomon says his deniers have—to downplay my dissidence. Reading The Deniers, however, has strengthened my resolve. It reminds me that in dissent against catastrophic predictions and wrongheaded carbon-regulation schemes, dissidents are in prestigious and courageous company. And it reminds me that the stakes are high: misguided carbon controls have not only damaged economic growth, they have also caused environmental harms, from deforestation, to overtaxed aquifers, to the damming of massive rivers. More recently, misguided biofuel programs—which can be traced at least partly to climate change fears—have contributed to rising food prices and global hunger.

I wish that Solomon’s book had been titled The Dissidents, so that it could have been accurately judged by the cover, and I only figured out why he didn’t choose this title when writing this review: Solomon wanted his columns to be read, and he knew that many people have bought into global warming propaganda so deeply that they would not have read past that title. It’s a shame that one has to resort to such tricks, but we cannot argue with success: The Deniers made it into the newspaper, and then into a book, which is a great achievement in these days of climate alarmism and intellectual bullying.

Kenneth P. Green is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image by Shutterstock/Darren Wamboldt.