The New York Times, otherwise known as the Gray Lady, presumably finding actual discussion of the scientific evidence related to climate change and of the mounting evidence of corruption of scientific process in the wake of Climategate too frightening to engage, launched a flurry of copycat articles in other newspapers and around the blogosphere when she published Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets early this month. You know the tactic: If you can’t refute the argument, attack the opponent.

Lauri Lebo, a blogger at “Religion Dispatches, picked up on the meme of discrediting critics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) by equating them with young-Earth creationists—blissfully (and lazily) unaware that the vast majority of said critics are old-Earth evolutionists.

But that’s not all. Even now, in March, 2010, four months into the self-inflicted crash and burn of climate alarmism, she (like many others who depend on the Gray Lady and other American mainstream media, who, unlike the British media, have studiously ignored Climategate) can write:

A peer-reviewed study by the University of Illinois at Chicago [UIC] from January 2009 of US-based scientists showed that of scientists most specialized and knowledgeable with regard to climate change (those who listed climate science as their area of expertise, and who also have published more than 50 percent of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change) 96.2 percent answered ‘risen’ to the question, “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”

Of those same climate scientists, 97.4% answered ‘yes’ to the question, “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

Of the 64 CAGW critics the Cornwall Alliance lists in Meet the Critics, I can’t think of a single one who would not answer “risen” to the first question, and hardly any who would say “No” to the second (since for a scientist 1 or 2 percent can be “significant”). The UIC study’s framing of the questions guaranteed the desired answers—which might explain why nearly 70% of the scientists who received the survey failed to respond. Why bother, when the bias was plain on the face of it?

The whole fracas (it’s hard to call it an argument, with only one side reasoning, and the other just throwing mud) is over the magnitude of the warming, the degree of human contribution to it, the danger or benefit expected from it, and the comparative costs and benefits of mitigation versus adaptation.

And which planet is Lebo living on? Not, apparently, the one on which Climategate broke out four months ago and has tarnished the reputations of pretty much all the “climate scientists” central to AGW alarmism and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), revealing that they’ve been involved not in science but in “post-normal science,” i.e., ideology masquerading as science.

Never missing a chance to jump on a crashing bandwagon, Jim Ball, senior director for climate programs at the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), told the Gray Lady that many of the deniers “feel that it is hubris to think that human beings could disrupt something that God created.” He added, in what seems to be a nod in the direction of creationists, “This group already feels like scientists are attacking their faith and calling them idiots, so they are likely to be skeptical” about global warming.

This is, of course, the same Jim Ball whose organization spearheaded the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) and its “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” back in 2006, and who in an informal debate with me at the Family Research Council in 2007 asserted that we (my colleagues and I) pretended to be scientists, while they (he and other ECI leaders) just believed “the scientists.” That claim lacked even the slightest credibility. After all, not one of the (unnamed) authors of ECI’s “Call to Action” was a climate scientist, and the document cited only one “scientific” source: the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001)—a summary written not by scientists but by bureaucrats and government treaty negotiators and that went far beyond the findings of the IPCC’s Working Group I scientific assessment.

By contrast, we had already published a significant study, An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy (2005). Did we pretend to be scientists? No, one of our authors, Dr. Roy Spencer, is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, principal research scientist in climatology at the University of Alabama and in charge of a NASA satellite global temperature monitoring program. Spencer, unlike the non-scientist ECI authors, also cited 22 scientific sources in his section of the paper.

Recognizing that the ECI’s “Call to Action” was misleading many evangelicals into thinking the debate over catastrophic manmade warming was settled, we then published A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming, systematically refuting every claim by the ECI, fully documenting everything to scientific sources. And this time we had not only Spencer as an author but also Dr. Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC and one of the main scholars to debunk the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph featured prominently and repeatedly in the 2001 IPCC report but gone from the 2007 report. The Call to Truth attracted endorsements from nearly 200, including scores of topic-qualified scientists and economists.

And now we’ve published yet another paper, A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence,and Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Examination of the Theology, Science, and Economics of Global Warming Policy, with Spencer again writing the science chapter (with 43 scientific sources) and another IPCC expert reviewer, Dr. Kees van Kooten, Professor of Economics and Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate at the University of Victoria, as author of the economics chapter (83 sources). Within two months the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming based on it had attracted over 500 endorsements, including over 150 leading evangelical scientists, economists, theologians, philosophers, pastors, and ministry leaders.

Ball, the EEN, and CAGW alarmists generally, all specialize in substituting ad hominem and straw man fallacies for reasoned debate.

We, by contrast, will continue persuading people the old fashioned way: by evidence and logic.