A little piece o’ comedy gold from last night’s “Hardball” in honor of the new Rasmussen poll showing just 37 percent of likely voters believe global warming is man-made compared to 47 percent who think it’s driven by long-term planetary trends. Having read the transcript at Newsbusters, I’m not sure how Matthews’s own position differs from Palin’s. He believes the climate is changing — and so does she. He believes man is a contributing factor (“I think the industrial age we live in, the last hundred years has had an effect”) — and so does she (“I believe that man’s activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change”). What she doesn’t believe is that Copenhagen’s going to address the problem in any meaningful way, which is almost certainly correct but undermines the left’s agenda, thus warranting the snideness here. Come for the wisecracks about “troglodytes,” stay for Matthews criticizing her for the way she signs books. Really.

Instead of sneering at her, this time could have been spent discussing the political pressures scientists feel to conform to the consensus or the risk of confirmation bias infecting a discipline whose conclusions are about to cost the world trillions of dollars of wealth. That’s no merely theoretical worry, either: We have enough overlap with Ace’s readership that I trust most of you have already seen his post about the data at one climate station being, ahem, “homogenized” to show warming instead of cooling, but read it now if not. Frankly, it’s a better use of your time than the clip. Click the image to watch.