Stewart Brand — author of “The Whole Earth Catalog” and creator of the term “ecopragmatist” (of which he clearly is one) — had a piece in the New York Times a few days ago in which he identified four distinctly different attitudes toward climate change. I encourage you to read the piece, but here’s a quick summary of his classifications:

Denialists: There is absolutely, positively no human cause behind whatever warming has occurred (if there’s even warming at all).

Skeptics: OK, there might be some warming, but the science isn’t nailed down tight, other factors have been given short shrift, and there’s a whole lot of scare-mongering going on.

Warners: The climate is changing and we’re headed for eventual disaster if something isn’t done right now.

Calamatists: Mother Nature is going to kill us all, and we deserve it because humans are loathsome, greedy and self-indulgent.

Feel free to declare where you belong on this scale. I’ll go first. I’m a skeptic who errs on the side of the warners. The more I read about the assumptions and models that support Climate Theology (and there’s been a lot to read lately), the more skeptical I become. Science, like journalism, is supposed to be obsessed with truth — no matter how uncomfortable it may be, how much research funding it endangers or how many political beliefs it imperils. What we know now that we didn’t know a month ago is that key members of the climate-science community are done pretending that contrary scientific judgments have any place in their deliberations. To them, climate science is settled and from this point it’s just a political argument. Problem is, history is rich with moments when science was “settled” and disbelievers were considered to be a political problem. Things tended to not end well for them, as you may recall. Does the name Galileo ring a bell?

Still, the fact that we continue to debate the science is a good sign. And because my faith in modern research is greater than my belief that some of it has been corrupted, I give the warners the benefit of the doubt. It would surely be a good thing to stop the increase in carbon emissions, and reduce it if we can. Just don’t blow those carbon emissions up my skirt. I really hate that.