The climate witch hunts have not only begun, they've accelerated. But how will the alarmists burn the heretics? They can't use wooden stakes. That would emit carbon dioxide.

No, Al Gore and his kind will have to use some sort of renewable energy. Maybe they will cook the apostates with the same solar panels that are roasting birds to death. Or chop them up in a massive windmill. They wouldn't want to be hypocrites.

Actually, they don't care. Global-warming industrialists such as Gore own sprawling homes (often more than one) and sail enormous luxury yachts, drive and ride around in carbon-belching automobiles and fly private jets, while all the time hectoring the common man about how he must cut his crime-against-Gaia CO2 emissions.

Recently arrived in this country is Prince Charles, the heir to the British crown, who lives in one of the largest homes on Earth. If he sticks to his usual routine, he'll be lecturing us about our fossil fuel use before the engines of the jet that brought him across the Atlantic can fully cool.

Charles is the man who warned in July 2009 that we had only 96 months to save the world. That's eight years in both metric and imperial measurements and almost six of those have elapsed.

So where are we now? In year 17 or 18 with no real change in global temperatures. Maybe we have more time than the prince thought.

Or maybe global warming just isn't happening the way the alarmists have been saying it would.

Charles will be gone by week's end. But he leaves behind Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, a high priest of the global warming witch hunt. The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee is demanding to know how the research of seven university academics has been funded.

This "inquiry" was "followed by an email to 107 organizations," says climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels on the Cato At Liberty blog , "ranging from private companies to think tanks, attempting to create a whisper campaign of allegations of impropriety."

Cato President John Allison politely told Grijalva what he could do with his demand, rightly calling it "an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don't like."

Allison told Grijalva he didn't have "the license to use the awesome power of the federal government to cow us or anybody else" and called him out for abusing his authority to "attempt to intimidate people who don't share your political beliefs."

Meanwhile, Gore showed up at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, to let us know what he thinks of those who disagree with him. He yammered about the need to "punish climate-change deniers," according to the Chicago Tribune, "saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting 'accepted science.'"

The former vice president, who is actually taken seriously by some, prattled on about the "denial industry" and claimed that "99% of the scientists and all the professional scientific organizations" backed his claims about global warming. Of course he meant "97%." Of course that number has been debunked and as a factual claim it is no better than an outright lie. Yet it is used continually as a bludgeon to shut down debate.

We finish with Vice President Joe Biden, who, according to The Hill, "painted skeptics of climate change as stupid in a recent interview." Biden's comments don't seem to be part of the climate witch hunt, but he'll get current soon. It's up to every member of the political left to support the narrative and make sure the skeptics are treated as rudely as possible.