This autumn, President George W. Bush belatedly held international meetings to discuss global climate change. It may have been a calculated gesture from a leader whose political stock has been plummeting for some time. But the move underscored the dramatic shift in the debate over global warming. Mostly ignored for years, climate change had burst into view again between 2005 and 2007 for a number of reasons: the release of a major scientific report that the Arctic was melting; the unprecedented natural devastation on US soil of Hurricane Katrina; two more years of record heat in 2005 and 2006 followed by an ongoing severe drought in 2007; the release in early 2007 of a gloomy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment of climate change; a renewed environmental and climate change movement symbolized by the popularity of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth; and, of course, the sweep of the Republican Congress that had featured climate change deniers like Senator James (“it's a hoax”) Inhofe (R-OK).