Hank Paulson, whose claim to fame in the public sector is panicking and browbeating the nation and its Washington politicians into accepting the Troubled Asset Relief Program in late September 2008, and who just two weeks later "put a (figurative) gun to the heads" of large-bank CEOs to "persuade" them to accept federal "investment" in their enterprises, has re-emerged to tell us, according to the Hill, that "Republicans are 'ready for a serious discussion' on climate change."

As a reminder, in 2007, the late Robert Novak wrote that Paulson "contributed to Bill Clinton in 1992, Democrat Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign, the feminist Emily's List and Wall Street's favorite Democrat, Chuck Schumer," before financially supporting George W. Bush in 2004. Paulson was also "regarded in his own administration as less a true Republican secretary than a transition to the next Democratic Treasury." One of Paulson's current assertions parrots global warming alarmists' claims in mid-May that that a serious and supposedly irreversible collapse of Antarctic Sea ice will catastrophically raise worldwide sea levels. Over the weekend, meteorologist Joe Bastardi, Chief Forecaster at WeatherBell Analytics LLC, relayed some very inconvenient data (bolds are mine):

CBS's Face the Nation Sunday spent fifteen minutes discussing climate change and amongst other things its impact on tornadoes - in particular the EF-5 that hit Moore, Oklahoma, last week.

As not one global warming skeptic was invited to participate in the panel, I've taken the liberty of getting opinions from some of the leaders on the realist side of the debate (video follows with commentary and full transcript of the segment at the end of the post):

As NewsBusters reported, global warming skeptic Marc Morano had a debate about climate change with Bill Nye the Science Guy on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight Tuesday.

After it concluded, WeatherBell meteorologist Joe Bastardi took to Twitter to lambaste Morgan and Nye for their views on this subject:

For years America's media have been enthralled by anything that supports the theory that carbon dioxide is warming the planet leading to an imminent cataclysm if governments don't regulate this partially man-made gas.

By contrast, reports that might undermine CO2's importance in global warming, like the following released Tuesday by the AAS Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico, predicting a sharp decrease in solar activity in coming years, typically get either little attention or are downplayed:

"A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore."

So wrote the New York Times's Leslie Kaufman in a rather surprising piece published Tuesday.

Shhh. Wait. It got better -- A LOT better: