Last year Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) inserted language into the fiscal 2008 intelligence authorization bill forcing the National Intelligence Council to issue a report on the national security implications of climate change. This Wednesday the NIC released its report, and liberals in Congress got the all the lazy alarmist headlines they wanted all along. None of the articles published in the major papers mentioned that the NIC issued the report with “low to medium confidence” or that no clandestine intelligence was used.

The Corner‘s Rich Lowry reports that when Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) asked NIC Chairman Thomas Fingar why the U.S. intelligence community would write a major analysis of low-to-medium confidence that contained no intelligence, Fingar answered, “because you [Congress] told us to.”