Steven Milloy's column last week on Fox's Junk Science page is a must read.

Not only does it effectively challenge the belief that CO2 is somehow dangerous and the fault of human activity, but it also dissects the language used by greens.

He mainly takes issue with two terms: "global warming denier" and "carbon footprint". 

His point is crucial in our new media: that words themselves, even common ones, can and are being used as propaganda.  Those of us who use them unwittingly may, in fact, be spreading the very propaganda we actually are fighting against.

In terms of "denier" he says this: 

Environmentalists have convinced many in the mainstream media that skepticism toward the very shaky science behind global warming alarmism is akin to the indescribeably creepy views of anti-Semitics who deny that the Holocaust occurred.

One event is an indisputable historical fact of hideous dimensions; the prophesied specter of catastrophic global warming, however, is just a politically driven fear scenario based on unreliable computer models and the wishful bending of the laws of climate physics.

There is no comparison.

Can anyone reasonably equate, say, the 31,000 U.S. scientists, engineers and physicians who recently signed a petition against global warming alarmism — including Princeton theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen — with the likes of neo-Nazis and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who constantly calls for Israel's destruction?

Surely Krauthammer doesn't intend to make any such equation, but his adoption of the greens' most effective word weaponry nonetheless plays into their thought-shaping rhetoric.

Thought shaping rhetoric.

That is the key to modern political debate, and global warming is mainly a political issue, not a scientific one.

Don't think for one moment his point is overstated.  Language has definite power, and the words we use most definitely shape our ideas and our reactions to people, events and issues.

Think, for instance, about how the abortion debate has been cast into "pro-life" and "pro-choice" camps.  Even by saying you are "pro-choice" you are subtly ceding the "pro-life" tag to the other side, implying that you are somehow ANTI-life, when, mostly likely, that is anything but the case.

Propagandists are fiendishly clever.  Beware.

And read the article: it's quite good.