The world hasn't seen this sort of panic since H.G. Wells.

They're turning off the Eiffel Tower lights for five minutes tonight to save energy.

There's talk of banning old-fashioned light bulbs in California.

And it isn't really a crisis until celebrities declare it so: A group of luminaries have formed Global Cool, which offers such helpful energy-saving tips as doubling up in the bath.

As United Nations scientists prepared to release a report on global warming Friday, the political rhetoric heated up as well: Many have blamed President Bush for rejecting the Kyoto treaty, but that was a 1997 document that President Clinton never asked the Senate to approve. And while Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., this week lamented the United States' "walking away" from Kyoto, he joined his Senate colleagues in a 95-0 vote that year expressing opposition to Kyoto or any other treaty that didn't include developing nations or which hurt the U.S. economy.

Furthermore, former Clinton aides now say Kyoto would have hurt the U.S. economy much more than they projected - while exempting one-fifth of the world's population in China, which didn't sign the treaty.

And despite the thundering herd heading off the cliff, there is still legitimate debate about the extent of mankind's role in the phenomenon.

Both sides in the debate claim intimidation by the other: Global warming skeptics - those who have yet to be convinced it's our fault - say they're treated like pariahs or nincompoops, while scientists sounding the alarm on global warming claim the Bush administration has been muzzling them.

Stifling debate on either side of the issue would be an outrage. We've got to hash this out.

But the good news in all of this is that we are.

And whether or not Friday's report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is right - that the burning of fossil fuels is the main culprit for global warming - the debate has inspired talk of energy conservation and energy alternatives on an unprecedented worldwide scale.

Global warming or not, that's a good thing.

If the IPCC report closes the book on who or what is to blame for global warming, the question going forward will be what to do about it. The twin dangers will be: doing too little, and doing too much.

Another obstacle will be global buy-in on solutions. It won't do any good if guilt-ridden democracies flog themselves while despots go on as before. And when the world's communists and despots make claims about their "greenness," it's verify, verify, verify.

But the biggest danger in our reaction to all this may be the temptation to overregulation.

Indeed, the California legislature is already considering outlawing the common light bulb, in favor of "compact fluorescent light bulbs," CFLs, which are said to use about 25 percent of the energy of regular incandescent bulbs.

That may be well and good, but the tendency to overregulate human behavior may never have found more fertile soil than with the global warming debate.

What good will it do to fight global warming if we cast too much of a chill over human freedom?