It is the hottest degree on the planet. Scientists, politicians and even elementary school teachers around the world blame it for Hurricane Katrina, catastrophic hurricanes in general, collapsing ice shelves and a whirlwind of other weather disturbances.

At the same time, a host of scientists and politicians on the other side of the spectrum vehemently argue that the link between global warming and its supposed effects is tenuous at best—requiring immense further research—and junk science at worst.

But the significant revelation is not as much where global warming is headed, but the lengths to which humans will go to get their truth accepted as the truth.

The scientific world agrees that Earth’s mean temperature has risen approximately one degree centigrade since the mid- to late-19th century. Tests also show that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen 30 percent over the same period, and scientists widely agree that this should contribute to warming in the future.

As to the real meaning of this data, however, scientists—and associated politicians—are sharply divided.

“Alarmists” trumpet rising temperatures, melting icecaps, flooded coastlines, weather disturbances, monster tropical storms and Day After Tomorrow-like catastrophes as results of the current and potential future warming trend. These scientists and politicians advance the phenomenon as common knowledge, and scientifically bulletproof.

Anti-alarmists argue that their boiling-world model is scientifically reckless and politically deceitful. They point out that most of the last century’s warming occurred prior to the last 30 years’ hot and heavy industrial growth and urbanization; that global warming models are based on unproven and incomplete data; and that even if the global warming models are true, they would not produce the results alarmists claim.

Here’s the twist. Intellectuals, scientists and policy makers on the politically correct left are sacrificing even the god of science in their crusade for global warming ideology—and its liberal agenda-serving implications.

While climatologists with dire predictions enjoy featured interviews in radio shows, scientific journals and congressional meetings, anti-alarmist scientists have lost funding, media exposure and political support. Some have even been threatened, libeled and discredited as industry yes-men and oil-drinking stooges.

In 1995, Dr. David Deming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Geosciences, published a review of the data showing North America’s one-degree temperature increase in Science journal. Deming later wrote, “With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. … So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing e-mail that said, ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period’ [a well-documented and widely recognized period during the Middle Ages warmer than any period in the 20th century]” (Tom Bethell, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science).

Scientists striving for objective analysis and further study of global warming have also encountered disappointed reporters more than once. When Deming was asked by an npr reporter if he really intended his article to imply that the North American warming trend was due to natural causes (a point he assumed was uncontroversial), Deming said yes. The reporter replied, “Well, then, I guess we have no story. … People are only interested if the warming is due to human activities. Goodbye” (ibid.).

In his book, Think!, Michael R. LeGault highlighted a front-page headline in the June 13, 2005, issue of USA Today: “The Debate’s Over: Globe Is Warming.” This self-declared be-all and end-all article contained no second opinions, no critical analysis and little if any allusion to the fact that thousands of scientists have evidence to the contrary.

As anti-alarmist scientists find their data drowned out by liberal agenda, political heavyweights add insult to injury, bullying dissenting views, cutting funding, and protecting suspect alarmist studies.

Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at mit, recently wrote in OpinionJournal.com about a climate of intellectual pressure that is silencing certain truths about global warming and preventing others from being discovered. “Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science—whether for aids, or space, or climate—where there is nothing really alarming?” (April 12).

This is not a minor concern. Today, the U.S. government spends $1.7 billion annually on climate research. According to Lindzen, who receives the money and for what purposes can be driven by head-shakingly political considerations. “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse.”

Throughout the 1990s, a liberal American presidential administration held congressional hearings and attempted to defame non-alarmist studies and researchers—while the scientific community at large stayed silent. Even for liberal scientists, it appears, science itself can be shelved for the “greater good” of liberal ideology.

“No matter if the science is all phony,” Canada’s Minister of the Environment Christian Stewart told the Calgary Herald in 1998. “There are collateral environmental benefits. … Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

If the global-warming debate is any indication, even science—long worshiped and championed by politically correct intellectuals and policy makers—can be heated up and burned on the sacrificial altar of liberal ideology.

The subtle truth behind the hottest degree in science is that left-leaning researchers and policy makers will abandon even their bread-and-butter intellectual, scientific reasoning when it means a setback for the liberal agenda.

That humans have polluted the atmosphere, land and water of the globe in gigantic amounts is not in question. That this gross corruption and crass irresponsibility is patently wrong in every way is also a given. But what is now visible inside the steaming global warming morass is a dangerous, sacrifice-all approach to embracing ideology over facts.