"It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals," the playwright Henrik Ibsen once remarked. "Let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."

After years of being labeled everything from devotees of a neo-Flat Earth Society to the equivalent of Holocaust deniers by an opposition that refuses to seriously engage them -- i.e. declaring unsettled science settled, refusing to publicly debate spurious claims made in one's Academy Award winning documentaries, repeatedly using scorn as a crutch to steady lack of reason -- the global warming skeptics gathered at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held at the Times Square Marriott certainly appeared fully on board with Ibsen's proposition.

For the record, judging by a sampling of articles, the conference was, indeed, a torturous experience for mainstream media journalists. It's a phenomenon not difficult to decipher: As one might imagine, the reputations of politicians Al "babies are burning" Gore, John "Cassandra-like hysterics are cool" McCain and the Exxon-threatening statist Olympia Snowe have not fared so well in the eyes of global warming skeptics. Nevertheless, the purest vitriol was reserved for the media. Hardly a session passed without a panelist cracking a chiding joke about Newsweek's 1975 global cooling story or decrying the simplistic sensationalism that drives the media from one never-quite-materializing catastrophe to the next. The cover of the conference program carried a picture of a bullhorn and the not-so-subtle query, "Can you hear us now?" Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast went so far as to openly lay out the skeptics' plan to "go around" an objectivity-challenged Fourth Estate for any reporter who would listen.

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