Facts are meaningless,” Homer Simpson once opined. “You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true. Facts shmacts.”

Thank goodness Homer is a cartoon character, or he might get a job on the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. That’s the outfit where an official, in between jobs as an oil industry lobbyist, took a fat red pencil to government climate reports to downplay the link between human actions and global warming. “My objective,” Philip A. Cooney told a House oversight committee lat month, “was to align these communications with the administration’s stated policy” of ignoring that link.

“Facts shmacts.” A joke on The Simpsons has become government policy. Just as bad, it has become a way of thinking for those who reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that a pronounced warming trend, due to rising levels of the greenhouse gas CO2, is the result of burning fossil fuels.

And make no mistake: There is consensus. Here is just a partial list of organizations that accept that the earth is warming rapidly and that the primary cause is human CO2 emissions:

• NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• National Academy of Sciences
• State of the Canadian Cryosphere
• Environmental Protection Agency
• The Royal Society of the UK
• American Geophysical Union
• American Meteorological Society
• American Institute of Physics
• National Center for Atmospheric Research
• American Meteorological Society
• Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Against this consensus, AGW (that’s “anthropogenic global warming”) skeptics marshal “facts” of their own, or trumpet inaccuracies in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. These arguments tend to exploit the unsurprising, unsolved problems that remain in any massive scientific endeavor. Or they quickly fall apart under the lens of scrutiny, like the discredited assertion that increasing atmospheric CO2 is itself the result of rising temperature, or that the current spike in temperatures is natural.

One of the most useful, or at least most frequently quoted, tools in this effort is a British documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is billed as a rebuttal of Gore’s film. Never mind that the effect is to reduce perhaps the most important scientific inquiry of our time to a clash between filmmakers. Martin Durkin, the film’s writer and director, described the film’s goal this way: “I think it will go down in history as the first chapter in a new era of the relationship between scientists and society. Legitimate scientists — people with qualifications — are the bad guys. It is a big story that is going to cause controversy.” (Swindle, by the way, has left a trail of interviewees complaining they were misquoted or mischievously edited.)

This assault on science itself, and not just its conclusions, is also seen in the AGW skeptics’ attack on the very notion of “consensus.” When individual scientists reach similar conclusions using a wide variety of models and experiments, they are accused of “colluding.” When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing several hundred scientists and researchers from 133 countries, declares that there is a 90 percent likelihood that rising temperatures are due to human greenhouse gas concentrations, the deniers say it is “politicized.”

When accusations of collusion or politicization fail, AGW skeptics suddenly become agnostics, urging people to keep an “open mind” on the issue.

But as the evolution “debate” has shown, there are limits to the open mind. It’s one thing to keep an “open mind” about the mechanisms of natural selection and the interpretation of the fossil record, quite another to weigh evolution and creationism as two thought systems that correspond equally to reality. AGW skeptics are asking us to keep an open mind not so much on the science of climate change, but on the very notion of science.

It is shocking how many Jews, coming from a tradition that produced an Einstein and a Feynman, a Gell-Man and a Salk, endorse this assault on science. Ever since Commentary magazine began publishing articles attacking evolution, it has become common for some Jews to reject scientific conclusions that they consider, well, inconvenient. The scientific method that they rely on in their own careers — in medicine, in manufacturing, in finance — seems no longer to apply when it clashes with their politics, or their investments.

No doubt it is important to keep an “open mind,” and sometimes Alberts become Einsteins when they reject the conventional thinking of the day. Still, with some subjects, there is a thin line between skepticism and denial, and global warming is one of those subjects. And here’s another: the Holocaust. When Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman compared AGW skeptics to Holocaust deniers, she meant not their motivations but their willingness to ignore the evidence. Holocaust deniers, and those who consider legitimate scientists the “bad guys,” use the same methods: Exploit esoteric disagreements to “disprove” the overwhelming fact of the Shoa. Accuse legitimate scholars of “colluding.” Dismiss whole fields of academia as “politicized.” And when all else fails, embrace the enlightenment notion of “academic inquiry” and insist that questioning facts like Nazi genocide is merely keeping an “open mind.”

Jews have a stake in defending the facts against this kind of trickery. It is not enough to defend science and historical method when it suits our purposes. Denial is denial. And sometimes you can keep your mind so open that it empties out.