Not even poems would help, I think. It seems Americans don’t want to give money away to developing countries to fund green projects in those locales. By a 57 to 39 percent margin, they say they’d rather not. And that’s when they heard that the figure was a mere $10B. Now Hillary Clinton is talking $100B. Asked how much they trust scientists, 29 percent say “completely” (are these all relatives?) or “a lot,” while a whopping 40 percent say only “a little” or “not at all.” Asked if they think scientists all agree or if there “is a lot of disagreement,” 62 percent go with disagreement.

It must be maddening to Gore and the environmental busybodies: didn’t people see An Inconvenient Truth? Well, not that many — and if they did, they’re not buying into the hype-a-thon. It seems that, once again, no matter how hard the liberal elites shriek, average Americans aren’t convinced by the Chicken Little-ism. Perhaps in hard economic times, the American public would rather not be pestered to send money to assuage the Third World decriers of Western “economic imperialism.” Maybe they’ve been reading up on Climategate and figured they were being had. Or maybe the high-pitched hysteria has been counterproductive. After a while people tune out, concluding that it can’t possibly be as bad as all those costumed Copenhagen catastrophizers make it out to be.

Nevertheless, a large majority, according to the same poll, is willing to regulate greenhouse gases, although that number has declined 10 points since June. So maybe the lesson here for the Green set is to lower the volume, be candid about what we do and don’t know, and make policy proposals that don’t strike average voters as absurd. Nah. There are polar bears dying because of this!! No, not really. But voters are tiring of listening to these and other horror stories. In the end, the most significant result of all the global-warming hype has been to diminish the credibility of the radical environmentalists. So maybe we should thank Gore after all.