The series, which won Kolbert lots of praise and awards from the environmentalist industry and its captive journalists, was really a protracted testimonial on behalf of the Al Gore Brand version of anthropogenic global warming.

Kolbert's Pittsburgh lecture stuck to the familiar alarmist story line. Though she promised her audience she'd present an unbiased account, Kolbert had no time for uncertainty or debate. She used the usual photos of shrinking polar sea ice, upwardly angled temperature and CO2 charts and computer models to paint a grim scenario of unavoidable climate troubles ahead.

Shortly after Kolbert confessed to feeling guilty about the big carbon footprint she left in the sky by taking a plane to Pittsburgh, she did something surprising: She fessed up to reality and acknowledged that global warming was a humanly unsolvable problem.

She wished she had a 10-point plan to "get ourselves out of this mess," she said, but there are no easy answers.

"Just to stabilize the greenhouse gas composition in the atmosphere," she said, "we have to cut our current emissions by 60, 70, 80 percent."

"That's huge. It's going to take pretty much everything we've got, and then some," she said, ticking off such necessary remedies as conservation, land-use planning, a tax on carbon. Or "perhaps just making due with less -- living differently."