I'm cold but only because there's no one else around to warm me up

On the heels of last week's revelation by Lou Holtz that global warming doesn't exist because he's cold, the Heartland Institute - a conservative sponsored organization - is holding its annual three day Comic-Con International Conference on Climate Change this week. The event, which attracts 600 or so global warming skeptics, hosts a who's who of deniers, including the president of the Czech Republic (An Inconvenient Truth doesn't translate well into Czech).

So it's going to be one big anti-global warming party, right? Well...

But two years after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with near certainty that most of the recent warming was a result of human influences, global warming’s skeptics are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support...[s]ome concede that humans probably contribute to global warming but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.

Ok, but they're still getting support from all their old sponsors, right?

But large corporations like Exxon Mobil...have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks. From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland.

Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support “to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Ugh, that doesn't sound too good. How is the institute rationalizing it?

Joseph L. Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, said Exxon and other companies were just shifting their stance to improve their image. The Heartland meeting, he said, was the last bastion of intellectual honesty on the climate issue.

Suuuuuuure. Here's a thought: when the oil companies aren't backing you anymore, it's time to give up the ghost.

They should just feel lucky that this hasn't happened to them yet: