Furthermore, with deficit hawks occupying more and more of the rhetorical high ground in Washington, and President Obama's ability to push his agenda apparently weakening by the day, it is difficult to see where any significant sums of money are going to come from.

Which brings to us the best line delivered so far in Copenhagen, concerning the U.S.'s commitment to meaningful action.

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing standup comedian Hugo Chavez! (From Politico's Glenn Thrush):

"If the climate was a bank they would already have saved it."

Everybody understands that these things couldn't happen. That when it comes to serious scientific endeavor, years of study and professional apprenticeship are required. In a word, expertise.

Ex-beauty contestants, drive-time DJs, TV sports announcers, hairstylists, newspaper columnists -- basically anybody whose math skills topped out in the 10th grade -- rarely have anything substantive to add to the sum of technical and scientific knowledge. That's what they most resent about it.

It's not impossible that such persons could educate themselves sufficiently to have an informed opinion, but it's rare. Most of us, most of the time, are like historian and blogger Josh Marshall: "The fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me," he wrote. "I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all."

Unless and until, that is, scientific endeavor impinges upon either A) religious belief, or B) the ability of tycoons to keep making money in precisely the way they or their ancestors have always made their money. Then it's every man and woman a climatologist, and every genuine expert an "elitist" enemy of God and the American way -- creationism with a thermometer.

Charles P. Pierce describes what he calls the "three great premises" of talk-radio populism in his acerbic book "Idiot America":

First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units ... Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough ... Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

So it was after thousands of private e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in England emerged via the right-wing noise machine into the British and American press. Caught red-handed acting like, well, like professors -- ambitious, idealistic, petty, egotistical, dogged and pedantic -- climate researchers soon got caught up in a media storm rivaling that surrounding golfer Tiger Woods.

Within days, representatives of various Exxon- and Koch Industries-funded propaganda shops like the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute started braying about "Climate-gate." Fox News headlined "Global Warming's Waterloo." Hannity told viewers, "Now we find out that this institute is hiding from the people of Great Britain and the world that, in fact, climate change is a hoax, something I've been saying for a long time."

Taking time off from her book tour, Sarah Palin wrote a Washington Post piece charging the "e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals."

Note the scare quotes around "experts." Palin's evidence for this conspiracy? Here's the worst of it: A 10-year-old e-mail from professor Phil Jones to Penn State colleague Michael Mann. You've seen it 10 times on television. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years ... to hide the decline."

Read it twice. So Jones brags about hiding a decline in global temperatures by "adding in the real temps"? The allegation's nonsensical on its face. If you read the entire message, Jones is talking about plotting a more accurate graph by throwing out inferential evidence from tree ring studies known since the 1960s to be less reliable. There's an elaborate scientific debate about why. Not one reputable scientist who's looked into this matter has judged otherwise. What's crucial to understand is that if Jones were proved to be faking data, his scientific career would end at once, along with that of anybody who helped him.

Scientists can be jerks too. However, the kind of worldwide conspiracy conjured by global climate change deniers like Palin, Hannity and the rest -- that is, as an evidence-free, religio-political cult that's the mirror image of their own movement -- simply can't exist in a scientific context. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice is vanishing, glaciers melting, sea levels rising, droughts and floods increasing, and the past decade -- according to the World Meteorological Organization -- was the warmest in recorded history.

But hey, look over there: some elitist e-mails!

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

Evidence that Michele Bachmann stepped in a bucket of crazy? Take your pick. Calling Barack Obama un-American? Check. Death panels? Check. Encouraging armed revolt? Check. Calls for mass self-mutilation and/or suicide to protest the Obama regime? Check.

Forget truth. Hell, forget truthiness. The era of the Birthers is Bachmann's epoch, because the bar is so low. Indeed, there is no bar. Just as Glenn Beck can portray President Obama as a follower of Mao Zedong simply by connecting the two on a blackboard with chalk, Bachmann can go onto the House floor, spout out any odd claptrap that comes to mind, and still get reelected.

Bachmann thinks more carbon dioxide is a good thing, since it is a "natural byproduct of nature," just like syphilis, I suppose. She has warned that AmeriCorps could lead to "re-education camps" for young people; she suggested armed revolt to stop climate change legislation (urging her supporters to be sure they're "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"). She keeps hinting that there is some creepy, sinister plot behind the 2010 Census.

Bachmann isn't just crazy, she's crazy's frothy-mouthed cheerleader. Take her speech on healthcare reform last August in Colorado, at a time when some Americans had lost perspective, composure and in some cases all grip on the facts during town hall-style meetings across the country. Bachmann happily stirred the big pot of lunacy. "This cannot pass!" she shouted at her Colorado audience. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."

Bachmann, of course, came to national attention just before the 2008 presidential election, when she declared on MSNBC's "Hardball" that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views." She went on to encourage a media and congressional investigation into the anti-American views of all of her enemies. Although her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, began to surge in the polls, that November she clung to her seat. The people of Minnesota's 6th District will get to have a third referendum on crazy in 2010, when Bachmann will face one of two Democrats: physician Maureen Reed or state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Unbelievably to the rest of the world, Bachmann's two-year jag of crazy seems to have strengthened her hold on her seat, but it's still possible she'll step beyond the realm of orthodox, increasingly acceptable right-wing crazy into a new crazy frontier that could cost her politically.

Possible, but not likely.

The award, says FoE, is meant to "highlight those business groups and companies that have made the greatest effort to sabotage the climate talks, and other climate measures, while promoting, often profitable, false solutions."

Agriculture giant Monsanto was nominated for promoting its genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to climate change and pushing for its crops to be used as biofuels. The expansion of GM soy in Latin America is contributing to major deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.... Monsanto also wants GM soy to be funded under the Clean Development Mechanism.

Seems to me that there is a bit of a contradiction at work here. If Monsanto believes that GM soy should qualify as a carbon offset under the Clean Development Mechanism, wouldn't that mean that the company would support a strong agreement on emissions at Copenhagen? If a world carbon tax regime or cap-and-trade scheme became reality, wouldn't that make Monsanto's products more valuable? (Providing, of course, that anyone could prove that GM soy plantations or GM corn-derived biofuels really did result in a net decline in greenhouse gas emissions, which seems highly dubious.) But I'm betting the voters in FoE's poll did not stop to think this through. Monsanto has become one of those brands that inspires overwhelming kneejerk antipathy -- the American Petroleum Institute never had a chance, even though API has done far more to fight action on climate change than any biotech company.

And of course, good reasons to distrust Monsanto are legion. I wrote earlier this summer about hints that the U.S. Department of Justice was considering antitrust action against Monsanto, based on the company's near complete monopoly power in huge sectors of the U.S. seed market. On Monday, the Associated Press published a blockbuster expose of Monsanto's anti-competitive practices in the seed business, written by Christopher Leonard (no relation), that makes a darn good case for trust-busting.

Among the goodies dug up by Leonard: When Monsanto licenses its gene traits to independent companies, the terms of its contracts include a clause that requires the licensee to destroy its inventory of seeds in the event of a change of ownership. What this means is that Monsanto's competitors have no chance to bid against Monsanto in any potential buyouts.

Monsanto's provision requiring companies to destroy seeds containing Monsanto's traits if a competitor buys them prohibited DuPont or other big firms from bidding against Monsanto when it snapped up two dozen smaller seed companies over the last five years, said David Boies, a lawyer representing DuPont who previously was a prosecutor on the federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.

Competitive bids from companies like DuPont could have made it far more expensive for Monsanto to bring the smaller companies into its fold. But that contract provision prevented bidding wars, according to DuPont.

"If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they're not going to have anything, in effect, to sell," Boies said. "It requires them to destroy things -- destroy things they paid for -- if they go competitive. That's exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw."

Maybe the Angry Mermaid can help?

The AP is mentioned several times in the e-mails, usually in reference to a published story.... The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.

Aha, shouted the climate skeptic blogosphere, which wasted no time in parading the e-mail in question, written by AP reporter Seth Borenstein, earlier this summer:

Kevin, Gavin, Mike,

It's Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It's in a legit journal. Whatchya think?

Seth

For the skeptics, this e-mail is enough to prove that Borenstein "is just too damn cozy with the people he covers." I don't know about that. It seems like typical due diligence from a reporter, in a conversational style appropriate to interaction with sources that you trust. Formerly a top aide to Senator James Inhofe, Marc Morano is, without doubt, a master at the art of wildly hyping. He is a primal font of climate skepticism, with the amp always turned up to 11. I like David Roberts' summary:

Morano's entire job is to aggregate every misleading factoid, every attack on climate science or scientists, every crank skeptical statement from anyone in the world and send it all out periodically in email blasts that get echoed throughout the right-wing blog world and eventually find their way into places like Fox News and the Weekly Standard. From there they go, via columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, into mainstream outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post.

For a good example of how Morano conducts his business, here's an attack on none other than Seth Borenstein, which he published in August at his blog, ClimateDepot.

When you cover a beat as a journalist, it doesn't take long to learn who is trustworthy and who is a tool. Indeed, one of the big problems with mainstream journalism is that too many reporters don't let their readers know what they really think about the sources they quote or cite. I haven't been able yet to find a copy of Borenstein's report on the above-mentioned study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- which argued, by the way, that natural causes, not humans, were responsible for rising sea surface temperatures -- but I'll bet that Borenstein did not tell his readers that Mark Morano was "wildly hyping" it. And that's a shame, because the more we know about Mark Morano's tactics, the more we can understand why climate researchers who have to deal with his misrepresentations on a daily basis were driven to injudicious decisions.

As for me, I think Morano is a tool. And for the record, his old boss thinks the same of me.