Taking Aim at Chicken Little

NEW YORK — "It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals," the playwright Henrik Ibsen once remarked. "Let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."

After years of being labeled everything from devotees of a neo-Flat Earth Society to the equivalent of Holocaust deniers by an opposition that refuses to seriously engage them — i.e. declaring unsettled science settled, refusing to publicly debate spurious claims made in one's Academy Award winning documentaries, repeatedly using scorn as a crutch to steady lack of reason — the global warming skeptics gathered at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held at the Times Square Marriott certainly appeared fully on board with Ibsen's proposition.