Global warming is a losing issue. The failure of the UN’s climate conference in Bonn earlier this month shows waning appetite for the issue on an international scale. A new survey commissioned by Yale and George Mason Universities finds that less than half of Americans believe that human activities contribute to planetary warming and just 39 percent agreed that “most scientists think global warming is happening.” Pew’s annual “top policy priorities” poll ranks global warming 21st out of 22 issues in importance, beating out obesity but trailing such off-the-radar topics as transportation and lobbyists. When unemployment rates exceed nine percent and national debt approaches annual GDP, citizens tend to focus on concrete rather than amorphous issues. In hard times, we want the news, not the weather.

Al Gore blames another culprit for his cause’s demise, namely, free speech. The Nobel Prize winner writes in Rolling Stone that “the ‘conversation of democracy’ has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired.” It’s not just that the public square has become a dangerous place for global warming, but that skeptics of anthropocentric global warming have put their money where their mouths are. “Polluters and Ideologues are trampling all over the ‘rules’ of democratic discourse,” Gore complains. “They are financing pseudoscientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is true and what is false; buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the politicians themselves have made ‘legal’ and can now be made in secret; spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.