Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker did not appreciate being ambushed by the local press.

But the superstar journalist, though wary, was a good sport when she was gently questioned by a fellow journalist recently in the nearly empty lobby of the Carnegie Music Hall in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh.

"Turnabout is fair play, I guess," she said to her interrogator, smiling but looking uncomfortable as she defended her well-known role as a global warming alarmist by saying humbly -- and disingenuously -- that she's not a scientist but merely a reporter who relies "on the consensus of the scientific community."

Kolbert had parachuted deep into Flyover Country to deliver a lecture/slide-show about global climate change to 960 Pittsburghers at the prestigious Drue Heinz Lectures series.

Her presentation was based on "The Climate of Man," the three-part, one-sided, epic magazine series she wrote for The New Yorker in the spring of 2005. Finely written and thoroughly reported, the series became the 2006 book "Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change."

The series, which won Kolbert lots of praise and awards from the environmentalist industry and its captive journalists, was really a protracted testimonial on behalf of the Al Gore Brand version of anthropogenic global warming.

Kolbert's Pittsburgh lecture stuck to the familiar alarmist story line. Though she promised her audience she'd present an unbiased account, Kolbert had no time for scientific uncertainty or debate. She used the usual photos of shrinking polar sea ice, upwardly angled temperature and CO2 charts and computer models to paint a grim scenario of unavoidable climate troubles ahead.

Shortly after Kolbert confessed to feeling guilty about the big carbon footprint she left in the sky by taking a plane to Pittsburgh, she did something surprising: She fessed up to reality and acknowledged that global warming was a humanly unsolvable problem. Continued...