Still stumped about the difference between funding Viagra and funding abortions, Sen. Barbara Boxer now laments that the climate-change debate has gotten off track:

Sen. Boxer criticized global warming skeptics who have “personalized” last month’s climate e-mail spat and this week’s talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. While the senator acknowledged the strong sentiments pervading this year’s debate are valid, she ultimately expressed concern the “personal” could soon “get in the way of the science.”

What’s “personal” about the discovery of e-mails showing an orchestrated scheme to conceal inconvenient data about climate change? What’s “personal” about a climate-change confab that has pitted the international emissions-limits agenda against developing countries’ ability to make a better life for their citizens by building a more prosperous society? I think that, in the Boxer lexicon, “personal” means “embarrassing facts that have popped up at a most inopportune time.”

One senses that things are not going so well for the environmental-hysteria mongers. But at least they’re consistent: so fervent in their belief system are they that all new evidence and new political developments inconsistent with the global-warming “emergency” must be discounted and ignored. Move along. Nothing to see. Let’s get back to the business of micromanaging economies.

The public seems increasingly unconvinced by this approach and more skeptical of the Chicken Little urgency that the global-warming crowd needs to justify the trillions to be spent and the economic regulation to be enacted. They must be taking it all too “personally.”