Christy: Well, there's any number of things. I suppose, fundamentally, it's the fact that someone is speaking about a science that I have been very heavily involved with and have labored so hard in, and been humiliated by, in the sense that the climate is so difficult to understand, Mother Nature is so complex, and so the uncertainties are great, and then to hear someone speak with such certainty and such confidence about what the climate is going to do is - well, I suppose I could be kind and say, it's annoying to me.

O'Brien: But you just got through saying that the carbon dioxide levels are up. Temperatures are going up. There is a certain degree of certainty that goes along with that, right?

Christy: Well, the carbon dioxide is going up. And remember that carbon dioxide is plant food in the fundamental sense. All of life depends on the fact carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. So, we're fortunate it's not a toxic gas. But, on the other hand, what is the climate doing? And when we build - and I'm one of the few people in the world that actually builds these climate data sets - we don't see the catastrophic changes that are being promoted all over the place. For example, I suppose CNN did not announce two weeks ago when the Antarctic sea ice extent reached its all-time maximum, even though, in the Arctic in the North Pole, it reached its all-time minimum.

And so heretically on. There are others like Dr. Christy out there in the scientific community who don't believe the best way to approach science is in a panic.

For example, Daniel Botkin of the University of California's Center for the Study of the Environment. His is an opinion some of us mere laymen may share: "My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it."

The planet does seem to be returning to one of its warmer phases, but the extent, cause and response to that phenomenon should be a matter for analysis and discussion, not frenzy.

It's as if we've forgotten that the first qualification for doing science may be a certain skepticism. I come by mine naturally when the subject is global warming, for I can remember being taught in school not that the planet is warming but that another ice age is almost upon us. It was a widespread assumption at the time taught as scientific fact. There was no doubt about it. All the scientists agreed. It said so right there in the book. I must have missed it somewhere along the way.