The Bret Stephens piece that Ed Craig excerpts below also brings to mind the work of Leon Festinger, whose pioneering work on cognitive dissonance theory is so applicable to a movement whose noisiest champions often lead the most incompatible lifestyles imaginable.

Festinger co-wrote (with Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter) the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled a fairly typical cult following: a housewife claimed to be receiving doomsday messages from aliens, who nonetheless offered hope for those who listened to their counsel. (Quick, someone check James Hansen’s immigration status, and bone up on the Alien Tort Claims Act climate litigation.)

Festinger et al. detailed how the failure of a prophecy to come about can often yield the opposite effect of what the rational person would expect: the cult following gets stronger and its adherents ever more convinced of their truth. One reading of Festinger, as to why the rational response should not follow in that situation, is that such prophesying is not rational, or the act of rational beings.

PARIS: The Group of Eight (G8) is set to fudge its decision on climate change next week, reflecting the issue's weaker status in the absence of European campaigning and in the face of sky-high oil prices.

A year ago, on the back of blunt warnings by UN scientists, global warming dominated the G8 summit in Heiligendamm.

Overcoming fierce US resistance, Germany coaxed the rich nations' club into agreeing to "consider seriously" the aim of at least halving worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Today, scientific concern about climate change has if anything deepened -- but the political focus on it has blurred.

"We have resources. We have technologies. But largely lacking is the political will," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday ahead of the July 7-9 gathering in Toyako, northern Japan.  Read rest…

Scientists say the jury is still out on whether rising sea temperatures will cause more hurricanes to hit U.S. coastlines. Yet some insurance companies are boosting premiums based on assumptions that they will. Others are withdrawing from coastal communities altogether.

Last year, Leanne Lord of Marion, Mass., decided to put her house up for sale after her insurance premiums more than doubled to about $2,892 a year since 2005. Many of her Cape Cod neighbors, who hadn't seen a hurricane in the area since 1991, followed suit. Today, there's a glut of houses on the local market.

"A lot of people can't afford to live here anymore, between the insurance and the taxes having gone up so much," says Ms. Lord, a 52-year-old public-health nurse. "They have been forced to leave and I think that is really sad."

Costs for homeowner insurance along the East and Gulf coasts have risen 20% to 100% since 2004, says the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. In the three years through 2006, says the institute, property and casualty insurers registered record profits, topping out at $65.8 billion in 2006. (Despite severe U.S. weather that has caused about $8.9 billion in insured property losses to date this year, it's too early to forecast 2008 profits.)

Investors Business Daily yesterday provided a brief but fairly recent catalog of considerations which illustrate the mushy ground upon which the contention of anthropogenic global warming rests.

Against the backdrop of the hysteria from the "mainstream" media last week in response to the prediction from the National Snow and Ice Data Center that the North Pole will be free of ice this summer, the piece points out that a similar prediction was made in 2000...yet the end of the world did not arrive as predicted.

The IBD piece also references the story I mentioned last week about the underwater volcanoes beneath the Arctic pouring lava and belching out greenhouse gasses

I recently read an article over at The Aviator Newspaper that really summed up the media coverage in this country on the global warming myth today.  It’s a chase to blame any type of weather event on global warming, regardless of whether or not it’s actually true.

I’ve said before on this blog that Hurricane Katrina was the poster child of the global warming movement in this country today.  Katrina, hardly the most powerful hurricane to strike the mainland U.S., was a category three storm when it pounded Louisiana in 2005.  Video of the destruction led the news for weeks, President Bush was all but blamed for the storm, and FEMA took the brunt of the criticism as supplies were late arriving at the scene.  The mainstream media focused on the strength of the storm and the awesome destruction left in its path.  Homes were left in ruin.  Boats floated down streets in New Orleans and some residents who didn’t heed warnings to evacuate died.  Hurricane Katrina was a direct result of our selfish attitude toward our planet.  Our globe had finally had enough.  Earth was angry and she was paying us back for all the damage we’d done to the atmosphere.  We drove too much.  We allowed industry to put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  And now we must suffer the consequences of her wrath.

About six months ago, I sat down with some like-minded folks and took stabs at what form of Sen. John Kerry's disastrous "global test" would most likely come from the presidential nominees this time around.

As you'll recall, during the 2004 presidential race Kerry proffered the following:

But if and when you [engage in preemptive war], Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Bad news out of Canada, according to Greenwire. It seems that not only have the Chinese overtaken the U.S. as the largest overall emitter of carbon dioxide, but our wretchedly excessive per capita emissions also have fallen behind other kinder, gentler nations.

China of course is and says it will remain exempt from the Kyoto scheme, much like other top and rapidly growing emitters India, South Korea, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico among 150 others.

Now, it turns out, those nice, polite neighbors to the north are larger per-capita emitters than Americans are. I wonder if they know that they can't just go around setting their thermostats where they want and driving the vehicle of their choice, and think other countries are going to just accept that.

"I want you to think about this," Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. "The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They're allowed to drill it, and yet they haven't touched it – 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America's total oil production."

Wow, how come the oil companies didn't think of that?

Perhaps because the notion is obviously false – at least to anyone who knows how oil and gas exploration actually works. Predictably, however, Mr. Obama's claim is also the mantra of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Nick Rahall and others writing Congressional energy policy. As a public service, here's a remedial education.