Are evangelicals buying into global warming alarmism? Since February 2006, media reports throughout the country have claimed as much, often citing the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), a document calling for federal caps on greenhouse-gas emissions and boasting the support of such influential Christian leaders as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels.

Climate-change alarmism has its Al Gore and Hollywood activists, characters whose appeal and personas transcend the issue to popularize green behavior. But where are the personalities of global warming skepticism? Outside the voices of conservative talk radio, whose scope of influence rarely extends beyond a static niche, the call for cool-headed environmental policy lacks star power.

A chorus of "I-told-you-so" has echoed daily across conservative talk radio stations since last month when data emerged from the four leading trackers of global temperature to reveal marked cooling over the past year-enough cooling effectively to erase the one-degree (Celsius) rise over the past century that has sparked so much public consternation about climate change.

For almost three decades Mercy Corps has mastered the business of relieving the needs of disaster victims and suffering societies worldwide. Floods, earthquakes, poverty, famine-the organization responds to crises on the ground with swift and efficient work that produces immediate, tangible, and donor-satisfying results. When displaced people groups are without homes, Mercy Corps builds shelters. When disease ravages the world's poorest regions, Mercy Corps provides health care.

President George W. Bush has consistently opposed federal caps on greenhouse-gas emissions, a policy position many environmentalists say contributes to global warming and is an embarrassment to the United States around the world. But Bush is not the country's only politician with executive power. State governors are increasingly taking the matter of climate change into their own hands, many pushing legislation that mirrors the international Kyoto Protocol-the very kind of top-down restrictions Bush rejects.

Having once campaigned to the left of such Democratic presidential candidates as Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, California attorney general Jerry Brown provoked little surprise last year when he carried out the plan of his predecessor to sue the world's six largest automakers for causing global warming. The surprise came Sept. 17 when a Clinton-appointed federal judge in San Francisco threw Brown's case out of court.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and politician Al Gore took center stage at Hollywood's Kodak Theater earlier this year to announce that the 79th annual Academy Awards had officially "gone green."

More accurately, the show paid others to go green, so it wouldn't have to.

Between the telecast, the Governor's Ball, and the red carpet event, the Oscars released some 250,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equivalent to the energy emissions required to power 16 average U.S. homes for an entire year.