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Even if the summer of 2006 wasn't as hot as that of 1936, it was still hot enough to remind us that if it got a lot hotter, it might be too hot. Arctic ice has been melting.

Yelps James Hansen at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most.

Hansen, who believes the Bush Administration is trying to silence him, wants us to stop burning fossil fuels. Perhaps as an alternative we could use telekinesis to make our cars go.

Although Gore has alarmed true believers with graphics suggesting that Florida will soon be submerged, others remain skeptical. As Julian Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute observes:

The melting of the Arctic ice will not itself contribute to global sea-level rise, as the ice floating in the sea is already displacing its own mass in the water. When the ice cube melts in your gin and tonic, the liquid in your glass does not rise.

But progressives might counter this by pointing out that when they get sufficiently agitated about global warming to start waving their arms around, their beer rises up in the bottle and pours out over their hands.

Environmental sciences professor Fred Singer of University of Virginia has also voiced skepticism:

Any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential. In addition, the impacts of warming and of higher CO2 levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities and especially for agriculture.

Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research is among those who note that if there is any global warming, it's caused by the sun:

It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years.

This might explain NASA's observation that it's getting warmer on Mars.

David Bellamy of the Conservation Foundation spells out the unbelievers' point of view:

Global warming – at least the modern nightmare version – is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not.

Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming, I say this is poppycock.

But all these Doubting Thomases are failing to take into account a study released by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which found that global warming is real and caused by white folks.

Just to be on the safe side, banks might want to stop offering anything longer than a 10-year mortgage — unless normal people develop a capacity to take Prince Albert seriously.

On a tip from Wiggins.