The layer of ice that has formed in the main-stream media over the Climategate story is finally cracking.

The largest newspaper in perhaps the bluest of states, New Jersey, has run on its front page a Politico column titled "Climategate Distracts at Copenhagen." The very liberal-leaning Newark Star-Ledger had put the deep freeze on Climategate for three weeks since the scandal broke, not breathing a word on the subject. Today's breakthrough column incidentally references Sarah Palin's Washington Post column in its second paragraph:

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin stirred the pot Wednesday with a Washington Post op-ed calling on President Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks over climategate and the "agenda-driven science" it exposed.

My own newspaper recently ran one of those smokestack photos without giving the reader the tiniest hint that the stuff you see coming out of the stacks is not carbon dioxide. As for the electronic media, I recently heard a New York radio broadcaster, whose name I won't reveal because I appear on his show now and then, mislabeling CO₂ as "soot."

In Happer's opinion, the carbon-control movement is really a population-control movement. He traces it back through the "Population Bomb" movement of the late 1960s all the way to the 18th-century writings of Thomas Malthus.

Other scientists have said the same, but Happer says it the loudest. He terms the IPCC crowd a "religious cult" and says, "Disagreeing with them is like going to Saudi Arabia and criticizing Muhammad."

As for the media, we've been guilty of putting our faith in the carbon cult as well, he said.