Naomi Oreskes has an op-ed in the Post this morning on this subject, in anticipation of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report release tomorrow. I went over a lot of this ground in researching the new book, and there’s one detail I can never get over. John Tyndall discovered what we now think of as the greenhouse effect at pretty much the same time that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In other words, the theoretical understanding of the behavior of greenhouse gases goes back just as far as the theory of evolution by natural selection.

That’s really something, when you think about it.

Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Storm World. He will contribute to Big Head DC periodically through election 2008.