Evidence continues to mount that the Greens have failed in their campaign to leverage global warming into a universal acceptance of their pet theories and practices, as suggested here last week.

The New York Times, no less, features an article titled "From a Rapt Audience, Calls to Cool the Hype" in which a number of scientists are given the space to sound off about Al Gore's masterwork, "An Inconvenient Truth".  "Part of the scientific audience is uneasy," the article states, going on to quote geologist Don J. Easterbrook, climatologist Kevin Vranes, and even longtime warming skeptic Richard Lindzen of MIT in criticism of Gore. All believe that the film presented an unbalanced picture rife with inaccuracies and exaggerations.

Of course, Al himself is allowed plenty of space to rebut the criticism - more than is ever given to, say, George W. Bush in articles critical of him. And the piece ends with a hymn of praise to the Tennessee Messiah from no less than his own personal scientific advisor. (In real life, this is known as "stacking the deck"). But the fact that the piece appeared at all is a wonderment - I though the debate was over.

The second point involves the collapse of the Bancroft-Arnesen polar expedition on Monday. The expedition was a stunt (a harsh word, I know, but the only one that's appropriate) intended to dramatize the effect of warming on the Arctic. The two trekkers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, planned to walk 530 miles from Canada to the Pole, swimming across rifts in the ice created by warming. Well, the rifts turned out not to exist, and the project had to be called off after only a few miles when Arnesen was threatened with frostbite. It appears that warming has a way to go - outside temperatures were hitting a hundred below zero at night. Bancroft and Arnesen returned little the worse for wear. "One of things we see with global warming," their expedition organizer Ann Atwood said by way of explanation, "is unpredictability." Uhh... right.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph, the UK's major center-right paper (Across Europe, you can publish those without anyone collapsing into hysteria. They still do some things better), reveals that Timothy Ball, a Canadian climatologist who appeared in the British anti-Gore documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", has received death threats in response to his defiance of the consensus. An anonymous e-mail message told him that "...if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming."

This is probably the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). There have no doubt been many such incidents where the scientists threatened have chosen not to call attention to it. The Greens, after all, are the movement that has produced such tolerant and openminded groups as Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front. We may yet see people physically attacked for their stance on warming.

Which will mean, of course, that the Greens will have utterly failed, as occurred previously with overpopulation, nuclear winter, and the coming ice age. The Greens have long believed that all they need to do is convince the elites and the media and then the rest of us will follow like so many sheep. If we keep very quiet about it, maybe they'll fail to figure it out, and continue wasting their time on empty stunts, death threats, and star turns by the Saint of Nashville.

Now there's an idea... why not have Al Gore walk to the North Pole? Even I'd pay good money to see that.