What on earth has gone wrong with the once reliable, objective Seattle Times? When I worked there for close to 20 years as a critic-at-large and a daily columnist, objectivity was the byword of reporting, whether the coverage was in politics, government, education, sports, and all the arts.

As an indication of what has happened, yesterday’s Times proclaimed at the top of Page 1 this most objectionable and unsupported headline in the form of a question: “Should roads have tolls to fight global warming?” By great coincidence, the headline immediately underneath read: “There was another side to the story.” It was totally unrelated.

However, I was immediately struck by the fact that the Times’ editors should have applied the sense of the second headline to the outlandish statement of the first. That takes some explaining, and I will do so with the internal pain brought on by the misguided tactics of a once great newspaper.

For reasons that are not easily explained, the Times has fallen hook, line, and sinker for the greatest hoax of the century, global warming. So have most other American newspapers, but that’s no reason for the Times to follow suit. When I worked there, every issue was examined by reporters and editors from both sides, pro and con.

Not so with global warming in this new age of one-sided reporting. If the Times operated on the same principles it employed years ago, it would have solicited the opinion of the great majority of honest, responsible scientists and particularly the opinion of the best climatologists in the U.S. and the world.

The “other side” of the issue would have alerted the Times’ staff to the fact that stratospheric warming trends have come and gone for centuries without harming the earth — and that the extreme environmentalists’ claim that the warming is caused by mankind is totally untrue.

All the Times’ reporters had to do to discover the truth was to take a relatively short ride down to the small town of Cave Junction, Oregon, and interview one of America’s brightest scientists, Dr. Arthur Robinson, president and research professor of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

A few years ago, Dr. Robinson sent out a petition to climatologists across the U.S. and in foreign countries, asking them their opinion regarding climate change. At last count, 22,000 of them signed the petition, stating that global warming was a hoax and that man has had nothing to do with the occasional warming periods.

That’s why I said the Times should have applied the sense of the second headline, “There was another side of the story,” to its lopsided global-warming view. The second headline referred to a local murder, but The Times should have adopted something like it to investigate the other side of the global-warming fantasy.

Incidentally, the first headline referred to the completely wacky notion that the Legislature is considering placing tolls on new road construction to pay for the “damage” vehicular emissions are doing by “contributing to global warming.” What a farce! But it will be an expensive farce the state’s taxpayers are going to feel in their wallets!