Last night, for the first time, I seriously considered entering the conservative echo chamber.

Through a news feed I found myself on Town Hall, staring at 300 words of empty rhetoric on Waxman-Markey by Mona Charen. After scanning the article and comments, I was emboldened to add a bit of perspective. I decided giving my address and phone number to Town Hall was too high a price to pay, but it left me thinking.

Ostensibly, Charen's intent was to use HR 2454 to brand the president as a run-of-the-mill liberal idealogue hopelessly out of touch with the "realities" of climate change and global politics. Although I couldn't stomach a close reading of the entire screed, two apparently contradictory observations caught my eye.

The first was a bit of rote climate change denial. Charen notes, without source, that global temperatures have "flatlined" since 2001. Intrigued, I surfed over to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which maintains a database on global temperature trends. The trend does appear flat -- provided you tilt your head at a 45 degree angle.

This hurts my neck, which is perhaps one of the reasons I don't do prayer so well.  Anyway, I assume her "data" must have come from someone in the oil industry, who had simply rotated the chart to get a talking point. George Will has no problem with this kind of analysis, so why should Mona Charen?

It continually amazes me that any rational individual can write off the patient research of thousands of climate scientists as fear-mongering by some liberal cabal. Even if you can, I can't believe you'd want to take even a 50-50 chance that they're right. But no matter.

I shook my head, and moved on.

That brought me to the second observation and another other conservative talking point: with India and China belching CO2 to beat the band, any action on greenhouse gases by the U.S. will be futile anyway. This confused me, because a few paragraphs up she argued that climate change didn't exist. She also failed to mention that while we still have a clear edge in production of greenhouse gases and dither over energy policy, China is positioned to become a global leader in solar and is taking a fair run at clean coal. And India, which has at least signed the Kyoto Protocol, is probably putting more low-emission vehicles on the road per capita than we are. We shouldn't be dissembling our lack of leadership, we should be embarrassed.

The rest of the article is predictable, as are the flame-throwing, me-too comments. But here's the problem. In this case, you can't dismiss this as reactionary pandering to the Republican rump. These arguments and their corollaries -- like the hypocrisy that says conservatives should oppose progressive policy on climate change because they care about the poor -- form a sizable chunk of the 212 nay votes on Waxman-Markey.

That's a huge echo chamber. Filled with an awful lot of folks that, to paraphrase Dave Matthews, seem to welcome perpetual summer and the chance to kick off their shoes and dive in the empty ocean.