I guess NBC and PBS have been reading my blog. After suggesting below that perhaps the networks were shy of saying “global warming” when talking about the hotter-than-hell week that was in the US, both newscasts came back with the sort of second look stories that aim to expand our understanding of the issue, even if they often yield little more than hot air. Friday night PBS’s News Hour featured a debate of sorts, moderated by Jeffrey Brown, with the New Yorker’s Betsy Kolbert and the Atlantic’s Gregg Easterbrook. Kolbert, who has been sounding the alarm on this issue for some time (and whose reporting on climate change garnered her a National Magazine Award) was less optimistic than Easterbrook who, echoing a commentary in this month’s Atlantic, said we can tackle global warming the same way we whipped smog in cities like Los Angeles, via law and public demand for greater fuel efficiency etc. “I certainly hope he’s right,” said Kolbert, which is about as close to rancor as the “debate” came. (A third participant, Ronald Bailey of the Libertarian magazine Reason, would surely have added a more contrarian POV had he not been muted by technical difficulties — caused no doubt by global warming.)

No credible science writer disagrees with the premise of Al Gore’s book and film, An Inconvenient Truth — that global warming is accelerating at an alarming rate and we have about ten years to fix it — and neither does any credible scientist. I doubt even the addition of Bailey would have turned the decorous News Hour studio into a food fight. But the press seems invested in making it seem like there is some controversy, or at least disagreement, here. Wednesday night, Brian Williams teased a report on the Nightly News by saying, “It’s hotter than ever — but is it global warming?” What followed were sound bites from scientists from Pew Research etc. all basically saying, yes, these sorts of weather events (scorching summers, apocalyptic hurricanes, melting glaciers) are indeed all consistent with a trend toward global warming. So why the note of doubt in the presentation? To keep viewers glued to the screen — or to appease the flat-earth types and energy lobbyists who insist on calling global warming a theory?

I suspect the latter, though I detect a note of panic in the recent outreach efforts of the oil companies. On Thursday the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the origins of an Al Gore parody that appeared on YouTube. “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” portrays the former VP as the Penguin of Batman fame, hypnotizing hapless penguins into thinking climate change is man-made and affecting everything — including Lindsey Lohan’s weight loss. Haha, that silly Gore. Turns out, though, that the parody was created by someone in the employ of the Washington DC media and lobbying firm DCI, whose clients include — Exxon Mobil! What a coinkydink! By trying to harness this most democratic of mediums (which Gore invented, remember?) and portray corporate propaganda as the free speech of the people, energy companies may be admitting that they have lost the fight, that truth has them scared and on the run and even the lame-duck Bush White House can’t save them from a popular uprising over this issue. We won’t be fooled by cheap graphics of the Jib-Jab sort into thinking this is not an issue to get all het up about. We’re not that stupid and easily distracted.

Are we?