Manhattan Institute

The breakfast tables in the grand hall of the NY Yacht Club were full of suits, gathered to hear Bjorn Lomborg, who appeared as he usually does in a short sleeve polo shirt, peddling his popular brand of global warming denialism.

It was a friendly crowd, pulled together by the right wing Manhattan Institute, ready to guffaw easily at Lomborg's jokes aimed at Al Gore. The irony was that to legitimate himself, Lomborg's opening gambit was to project a photograph of himself, the blond Lilliputian, shaking hands with the former Vice President, Nobel Laureate and Oscar winner.

But the crowd was not quite prepared to deal with two things in particular that Lomborg had to say: one, that global warming is real, the science legitimate; and two, that President Bush's ethanol policy is "just very, very bad." But he more than made up for it to his hosts by saying there's no need to do much to solve climate.