For those who missed this explosive mini-controversy from last week, the Heartland Institute, a think tank publishing lengthy reports contradicting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about man-caused global warming, paid for the placement of an electronic billboard in Chicago that repeated a notorious criminal's belief in global warming.  A huge outpouring of criticism about the billboard prompted Heartland to pull it.

It was illustrating absurdity with absurdity that backfired because global warming alarmists weren't put into a defensive position of explaining why the issue is on the verge of total collapse. As Rush Limbaugh noted recently, "you never descend to the level of your opponent or they win."

The billboard clearly did not advance the skeptic position, but it at least illustrates how the best defense is to go on the offense. As this opportunity was widely grabbed by alarmists to portray Heartland as daffy, corrupt, and politically motivated, it serves as one more example of how alarmists rely on shell games keep the public from fully comprehending the enormous faults in the idea of man-caused global warming.

Yawn. A tried-and-true shell game tactic to distract the public away from the existence of legitimate scientific skepticism, which is found in abundance in Heartland's multi-thousand page reports citing thousands of peer-reviewed science journal-published papers that seriously questions the IPCC's climate assessments.

Yes, the billboard was a gift to alarmists on a silver platter, but ultimately is a fleeting reprieve in the unavoidable collapse of the entire issue.

The issue is only kept alive when people -- whoever they happen to be -- unquestioningly accept a trio of 15 year-old talking points saying "the science is settled, skeptics are corrupted by industry money, and everyone may ignore skeptics because of the prior two points". Alarmists have failed for nearly 20 years to prove the science is settled or that skeptics are unworthy of public trust, but they've only accomplished this by avoiding any debate about those assertions.

When a shell game tactic is the only thing global warming alarmists have to rely on to keep their issue alive, it speaks volumes about their agenda.

Russell Cook has written eleven articles at American Thinker on how the smear of skeptic climate scientists falls apart. Follow him at Twitter, @questionAGW