A passionate environmentalist went head-to-head with Tucker Carlson and conservative author Chris Horner on Hannity tonight and, given the copious cult and spaceship references, Betsy Rosenberg handled the debate with relative aplomb, considering she was treated not unlike what one would imagine a creationist would be treated like on an all-liberal panel.

In an article dramatically titled “As the World Burns,” Ryan Lizza gives readers of The New Yorker a lengthy account of Washington’s inept handling of climate change issues. Lizza also paints an unflattering portrait of Sen. Lindsey Graham, revealing that the Republican tried to expedite a climate change bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was serious process.”

Last week, a British eco-interest group called 10:10 UK released a video advertising a new initiative that calls for participants to lower their carbon emissions by 10%. The video, called “No Pressure,” shows a series of clips in which various people tell groups about the initiative, then blow those who don’t want to participate to smithereens. Its imagery is so graphic that after receiving numerous complaints, 10:10 took the video off of its website and issued a vaguely apologetic mea culpa.

In the debate on global climate change, Global Warming proponents may have just gotten their favorite closing argument back. The Associated Press is reporting that a British panel, made up of the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee, has completed an investigation today that clears the Climategate scientists of nearly all wrongdoing and validated their initial findings.

There’s just something about climate debates that seems to convince long-forgotten 90s icons they deserve a political platform upon which to preach their ideas. Last week, we saw the unfortunate politicization of Bill Nye the Science Guy– yes, the one who taught you what cells were before you got yelled at by The Chief on Carmen Sandiego– prompt an inevitably feud between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow. Next up to bat is rapper Biz Markie.

Ok. Well this should clear things up somewhat for those folks out there who are confused as to what side of the climate change debate Glenn Beck falls on. He apparently thinks it’s merely another conspiracy theory. Move over Birthers and Truthers!

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman often makes valid points on climate change and clean energy, but for a variety of reasons, he’s the paper’s most vehemently-ridiculed columnist. Unfortunately, his latest column, which appeared today in the NYT print edition, will do little to quiet such criticism.

On Friday’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, the host took a few minutes to politely disagree with Glenn Beck‘s views on global warming, including his refuting of Maddow’s guest Bill Nye the Science Guy. “It is one thing to be outrageously wrong about facts and science, but the price of that is getting made fun of for it and getting called out on it — boom! — by Bill Nye the Science Guy,” Maddow concluded.

Rachel Maddow takes no prisoners. Infuriated by the gratuitous right-wing jubilation that the massive Northeast snowstorms completely expose global warming as a hoax, Maddow took the liberty of making a series of analogies ranging from basketball to tadpoles to winning the lottery to disprove that connection. Short version of her argument: anomalies exist.

But just to assure the audience that her point was absolutely irrefutable, she brought an absolutely irrefutable personality on the air to agree with her: beloved childhood icon Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Yesterday, Representative Joe Barton, known to his critics as “Smokey Joe” for his staunchly free-market, anti-regulation stance on corporate pollution, went on C-SPAN to discuss … wait for it … Climategate. The Climategate affair, and the public skepticism about man-made global warming that it has helped produce, have to be a small triumph for a man who has been a staunch skeptic since before it was fashionable.

You’ve no doubt heard the story by now: hackers recently got hold of a bunch of emails from some climate scientists and the University of Anglia. So now some have decided these emails are the smoking gun to some grand global warming conspiracy, cooked up just for sport. And the controversy broke just in time for the Copenhagen summit! So who are the Winners and Losers of the Climategate scuttlebutt? It involves Sarah Palin, Tiger Woods and, of course, Copenhagen. Find out more inside!

John Stossel‘s new Fox Business Network premiered last night, and despite the initial reports it would be about “Atlas Shrugged,” it instead focused on climate change.

As expected, there wasn’t much of a business angle to it. But it did allow Stossel to flex his full libertarian muscles, with a thoughtful show that took a single issue on in depth.

The Climategate affair continues to move from fringe Internet cause to mainstream debate. Case in point: CNN is talking about it more and more. The network is often accused of waffling in its reporting and failing to come to strong conclusion. But their latest piece on the hackers behind Climategate was anything but waffly: it was, in the lingo of climate change skeptics, ‘warmist,’ all but putting its foot down and calling global warming an undisputed fact:

In preparation for President Obama’s upcoming visit to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, environmental activist group Greenpeace and tcktcktck.org have rolled out an ad campaign that has some chilling elements. While the right constantly accuses the President of apologizing now, Greenpeace predicts Obama will be sorry in 2020 if he doesn’t save the world in Copenhagen.

Climategate has slowly but steadily bubbled up from fringe meme on the Internet to hot-button political and scientific cause. Do a set of emails from a hacked climate research server show that global warming is a hoax? Paul Krugman contends that there was “not a single smoking gun” to Climategate, and that the global warming skeptics using the hacked emails as evidence need to brush up on their science.

Future former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post yesterday, in which she roundly dismissed the idea of cap-and-trade. The piece is generating quite a lot of discussion – but agree with her or not, cop to her expertise or not, Palin’s interconnectedness with energy policy is indisputable, making her voice newsworthy.