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We live in a highly commercialized society. Almost every minute of the day, advertisements and agenda-driven data bombard us from all directions.

Yet, even though Americans are tugged in nearly every direction-politically and commercially-the reasonable among us are generally not easily tricked. We can smell if something is kooky, fishy, or otherwise dubious. For instance, how many reasonable people would conclude that smoking doesn't cause cancer based on the findings of a study funded by Marlboro? How many people would immediately switch to drinking strictly dark beer after reading nutritional evidence of its more salutary effect on the body if, say, Guinness sponsored the study? No one.

Yet, where environmental issues are concerned, many people check their critical minds at the door.

Think about it. If an environmental organization posits that the globe is warming at an alarming rate, or that energy resources have hit an alarming low, or that space for storing garbage is alarmingly harder to find, many Americans shake their heads in agreement, acknowledging that the particular crisis is real and that it requires a particular solution. But the concerned citizens of the world forget one thing. Environmentalism is not a passive movement, but a vibrantly active one. As the "ism" at the end of the word ought to denote, environmentalists have an agenda and a belief system. Environmentalism's great raison d'être is to look under every rock for evidence of the nefarious ecological crises that modern humanity has wrought and then sound the alarm.

For evidence, look at the political reaction to Al Gore's new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which premiers this week. Harry Reid thinks Gore's flick is so important that he vows to "make sure we're not going to have any votes tonight so we can come see your movie." Furthermore, Reid asserts that, although Bush has made countless mistakes as president, which in the Democrats' opinion include lying about and perpetuating an unjust war, spying on Americans, violating the Bill of Rights, stealing an election, and robbing the poor to line the pockets of the rich, nothing-nothing-is "comparable to his ignoring the death of our planet."

That's not the voice of a concerned public servant who carefully considers the evidence of a claim and the likely consequences of remedial legislation before acting; that's the voice of a dogmatic activist.

Or consider the attitude of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body that ostensibly subjects data on global temperature trends to scientific analysis. Holding true to UN style, the panel has, within the last few years, gone corrupt. In 2003, an economist from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a statistician from the Australian Statistical Bureau pointed to a hidden flaw in the methodology of the IPCC's analyses. They argued that a statistical error resulted in climate numbers that were way too high. The reaction of the seemingly disinterested, ideologically unbiased UN panel? Castigation. The IPCC released a press report denouncing the findings of the experts as "misinformation."

Or consider the case of Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, author of the highly incendiary yet data-laden book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Although environmentalists consider him a traitor and an enemy to the movement, Lomborg believes that global warming is real. His only objection is that, in light of the host of other crises ravaging our world, such as starvation, AIDs, and malaria, the threat climate change poses is negligible. "Climate change is not the most urgent problem facing the world's poor majority," Lomborg writes.

This isn't exactly what most would consider an apathetic view toward ecological problems and human suffering. Yet Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, seemingly detests Lomborg with unquenchable fury. "What is the difference," Pachauri rhetorically asked, "between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's?"

" Global warming is real," environmentalists like Gore often bellow. The scientific consensus that ostensibly buttresses this claim, however, has yet to manifest itself. The "inconvenient truth" is that many scientists object to mainstream climate change research and wonder why the General Circulation Models (GCMs) that show only negligible warming or point to increases in solar radiation as the cause are ignored.

Not only have politicians and the media caught the global-warming-is-undoubtedly-real fever, but the dogmatic contagion has even infected public education. In my high school geography class, I encountered this gem of a quote, which treats global warming, out-of-control population growth, and natural resource depletion as established facts and potentially world-devastating crises, in the opening lines of my textbook: "In a sense, the world is a fragile place. The challenges of growing populations and shrinking resources, global warming, and nuclear waste all stand to threaten our fragile environment-for people and places all over the globe."

No matter how many times you restate an uncertainty as if it were fact, a fact it will never become. Contrary to the claims of the Gore's documentary, an intellectually honest assessment of the scientific community and available climate data demonstrates that there is no "consensus" that human-caused, earth-threatening global warming is "real." Any claim to the contrary smacks of environmentalist dogmatism.

To the modern environmentalist movement, that may be "inconvenient," but it's still the truth. CRO

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