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I had planned, tonight, to comb through all the naysayer responses to last week's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The United Nations report declared the evidence of a changing climate "unequivocal" and pointed the blame at fossil-fuel-burning humans. I expected an outcry from the global-warming-is-a-hoax set.

The title of the post would have been, "You can lead an industry-funded pundit to data, but you can't make him think," or something to that effect.

I figured would cull from all the usual suspects' commentaries: Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine, Richard Lindzen in the Wall Street Journal and James Inhofe, that abject oil-funded idiot some ill-informed blockheads in Oklahoma elected as their senator, to make the point that no matter what you tell these people -- no matter what evidence you present that carbon emissions largely caused by the burning of oil and coal have contributed to the quickening warming of the planet -- they will continue to spout the nonsense that pays their salaries.

There is, then, no hope for reasonable, rational discussion. No chance to arrive at truth.

The paid-pundit curse, I would call it: As all these people enjoy oil-industry largesse, I don't see why their opinions should count anyway. But, you know, it's American journalism: Fair and balanced, unbiased and objective. So even if someone tells you 2+2=4, you must investigate and give audience to the people who will tell you that 2+2=5 (anecdoate stolen from Michael Kinsley, with apologies).

Oh, but I was wrong.

Sure, there's Inhofe in the Senate, arguing that "The same people who are hysterical about this, who have pictures of the poor polar bear standing on the last remaining ice cube, were the ones who were saying, just a few years ago, another ice age is coming and we're all going to die" -- a hoary argument if there ever was one, one that had some diginity in 1988, when George Will was weighing the data about the greenhouse effect, but just seems goofy now.

(In response, Senator Barbara Boxer offered a document written up by the leaders of several U.S. Corporations, from DuPont to Duke Energy to make the pont that "my dear friend Jim Inhofe is pretty alone on this.")

Other climate naysayers stayed quiet in the wake of the IPCC report. Still others, such as Bailey, admitted he was wrong (I think. I can never be sure). And many others ran for cover.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

[Canadian Prime Minister] Stephen Harper moved yesterday to mend his government's frayed international reputation on climate change by dispatching his Environment Minister to Paris for a key conference and promising to join an emergency UN summit on the issue.

The decisions came as the Prime Minister was battered for a second day in the House of Commons over a letter he wrote five years ago in which he called the Kyoto accord a "socialist scheme" aimed at sucking money from wealth-producing nations. . . .

From the UK Guardian:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments forarticles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

From the WHITE HOUSE Press Office (!)

The Administration welcomes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was developed through thousands of hours of research by leading U.S. and international scientists and informed by significant U.S. investments in advancing climate science research," U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman said. "Climate change is a global challenge that requires global solutions. Through President Bush's leadership, the U.S. government is taking action to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging the development and deployment of clean energy technologies here in the United States and across the globe."

"President Bush's leadership"? They're such kidders over there in D.C.!

Anyway, you guys, the jig is up. You're surrounded, outnumbered and outclassed. Now listen up: You take over the service jobs, the typing, the barista duty and the note-taking; we who paid attention early to the harbingers of a changing climate, we get to run the world. Pour us a nice, cold drink and get out of our way.

If only it were that simple.

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