Of the two climate change wars currently being waged across the globe — the war against climate change and the war about climate change — it’s War 2 that’s now occupying the most territory.

While large armies of government leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and environmentalists continue grimly to fight War 1, against growing resistance, the smaller forces of climate sceptics, conservative politicians and hyperventilating columnists are clearly gaining the tactical ascendancy in War 2.

To sense the growing battlefield momentum inside the Sceptics Army, here’s a sample of comments over recent days:

  • ” … in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud … that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug”. – Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
  • “Now, even the UN has realised that the scam has been exposed and that the support base for its massive global swindle has melted more rapidly than any Himalayan glacier”. – Piers Akerman, Sunday Telegraph
  • “There seems little doubt we will see more examples of IPCC exaggeration: finding holes in the report is beginning to feel like shooting fish in a barrel”. – The Australian
  • “Public opinion has changed as the credibility of the IPCC ebbs, the crippling cost of climate change measures becomes apparent and the array of rentseekers and phonies grows.” — Miranda Devine, The Sydney Morning Herald

The failure to achieve anything like consensus at the Copenhagen climate conference in December, combined with the emergence of several embarrassing flaws in the methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has clearly put a rocket under the confidence of the Sceptics Army.

If wars are won through a series of battlefield victories, combined with success on the propaganda front, it now seems that victory in War 1 is far from certain and that guerilla tactics are clearly working in War 2.