Green groups work closely with big business to get their agenda through, though they complain to no end at any collaboration — be it real or, as in the case of their ongoing ExxonMobil jibberish, imagined — between their opponents and business. Similarly, I was reminded a couple of weeks ago — by a spokeswoman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, which incidentally also teamed up with Enron to get the U.S. involved with Kyoto – that it is “inappropriate” to look at a cool year or few years when assessing temperature trends. Yet green groups and UCS in particular made their bones waving their arms maniacally about the hottest second Tuesday in a non-Leap Year February, etc., as I reminded her in reply.

During one of a few talks I gave in recent days, an audience member complained that, while I didn’t use 1998 as a baseline to describe recent temperatures, if I had that would have been intellectually dishonest which, really, is what those of us who expose global-warming alarmism are all about. Of course, to claim a warming trend in practice has required invoking “since 1860!”, the seemingly arbitrary war cry of the alarmists for a decade (until chastened by the counterclaim that 1860 is the approximate end of the Little Ice Age). Now they ritually say “in the past three decades” without mention that 30 years ago marked the end of three decades of cooling. Don’t even get me started on the mansion-dwelling and jet-setting scolds that are the global warming industry’s bossiest mouthpieces.

It was with those recent reminders of the rampant hypocrisy of the global-warming political movement that I saw the Huffington Post invoking “man-made global warming” in mocking Sarah Palin. So please don’t miss the Hooterville Gazette’s equally direct response. Once again, it seems so much more productive to simply argue the merits, if you’re able. Not to mention less risky that you’ll be exposed as a hypocrite.