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Nothing drives the progressive and liberal communities up the wall as much as the staunch ideological approaches of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

On environmental and most other issues, the Journal without question tows a hard-right line, and it does so in a way that also frustrates even nonpartisan journalism observers, who often complain that op-ed contributors are not fully identified, for instance their affiliations with partisan think tanks. On its behalf, the Journal can point to its upholding a long-held and respected journalism tradition: unequivocal positions, strongly worded, and vigorously stated. The paper seems to maintain an impenetrable iron wall between news and editorial, and a good piece of the core of its influential readership appears to like those editorials just the way the paper serves them up – no punches pulled.

OK, already. But Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Climate Institute at Columbia University, was having none of it. Sachs took the Journal editorial page on in a September 14 "Fiddling While the Planet Burns" Scientific American column.

He chided the editorial board for sitting cool, "insouciant and comfortable" during a wilting New York City summer while praising the Journal overall as "an excellent paper, whose science column and news reporting have accurately and carefully carried the story of global climate change." The editorial page, wrote Sachs, "sits in its own redoubt, separated from the reporters ... and the truth."

Sachs singled out in particular a July 2006 WSJ editorial headlined "Hockey Stick Hocum," an editorial that more than a few climate science experts found especially outrageous and disconnected from reality. He cited the usual litany of established science to the contrary and said that in the end the Journal editorial writers "hid the evidence and trashed climate science."

He landed on another reality often acknowledged by those within and beyond the Journal who know it best: the reporting staff frequently is embarrassed by – and very deliberately maintains a safe distance from – the editorial page. Sach's words: many Journal reporters "laugh or cringe at the anti-science posture of the editorials."

Sachs says it's impossible to simply disregard the editorials because the paper then "gets a free pass on editorial responsibility."

Sachs extends in print an invitation he says he's made numerous times: have leading climate scientists meet with the Journal's editorial page, and "include in that meeting any climate-skeptic scientists that the Journal editorial board would like to invite." He hopes that this time his invitation will be accepted.

It will be interesting to see if indeed it is.