Update: Crooks and Liars has video.

Transcript via ABC.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, he is also going to be dealing with health care, right now on the floor of the Senate. He announced this week to Copenhagen to deal with climate change. And it comes at a time when the politics seem to be changing a little bit in this.

Let me show our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. It shows whether people believe global warming is occurring. That number is going down. July 2008, 80 percent of the public; down to 72 percent now. And there’s been a sort of a real partisanship. Look at Republicans, 74 percent believed global warming was occurring back in 2008. Now, a 20-point drop to 54 percent.

George, there has been a partinizing of this issue, and let me turn to one more complication we’ve had over the last week. This Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, someone hacked into their e-mail account and showed a bunch of emails between scientists, which opponents of climate change legislation said proves that they are rigging the science and trying to hide information that runs counter to their theories.

WILL: It raises the question of — we’re being asked to wage trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven. And the consensus far from being as solid as they say it is, and the debate as over as they say it is. The e-mails indicate people are very nervous about suppressing criticism, gaming the peer review process for scholarly works and all the rest. One of the e-mails said it is a travesty, his word, it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn’t be embarrassed about that. It’s a complicated business, and that’s why we shouldn’t be (inaudible).

KRUGMAN: All those e-mails — people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There’s not a single smoking gun in there. There’s nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn’t actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that’s loose wording. Right? Everything is about — we’re really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there’s no trend here. And that’s what — the travesty is how hard it has been to explain…

WILL: One of the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of the medieval warming period. That lasted 600 years…

KRUGMAN: It’s not — read — this has all been explained. What he meant is they want to put a start on it. We have an end to it, we don’t have a start on it. There’s a lot of loose use of language when you’re just talking among each other. And what (inaudible) really meant, deleting would be meant that, you know, we don’t know when this thing started, because we don’t have very good data back then. There weren’t any weather stations. And that’s what the context was.

DOWD: The interesting thing about this is, which goes back to our previous discussion is, and having done a lot of this polling during the Bush administration, which is when you give people a choice between improving the economy and jobs, and improving the environment, at times of economic prosperity, the numbers for improving environment go above jobs. At a time when there is a recession or at a time when there’s a difficult in the economy, people say let’s focus on this, let’s not focus on the climate. The best route to passing climate change legislation is creating jobs and then (inaudible).

ROBERTS: But the difference between that kind of polling and what George just showed in our ABC poll is that — is that people are not agreeing on the facts. It’s not a question of asking about the legislation.

(CROSSTALK)

DOWD: If they want to go to a different position, they have a tendency to then doubt…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, that’s what might be happening here, is people who are opposed to cap-and-trade are changing their minds on global warming.

(CROSSTALK)

SENOR: In June of this year, the House voted, close vote on cap-and-trade, 219:212 votes. One out of five congressional Democrats voted against the cap-and-trade bill. If that vote were held today, against the backdrop of this news, plus even worse economic numbers to Matt’s point, I guarantee you…

(CROSSTALK)

(UNKNOWN): Nancy Pelosi was very clever to get that in her pocket when she could.

ROBERTS: But for the president to then be going to Copenhagen with all of this going on, becomes somewhat problematic for him, I think.

WILL: But what I was going to say there is that the United States pledges to reduce its carbon emissions 83 percent below the 2005. That will not even be seriously attempted, and here is why. That would mean we would have total carbon emissions equal to the United States in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. Furthermore, our per-capita carbon emissions in 2050, when he says this is going to happen, when there’s going to be 420 million Americans, would be on a per-capita basis what we had in 1875.

STEPHANOPOULOS: (inaudible) credibility problem as well. I mean, I think the issue is, I think the president had to go to Copenhagen. It was the only way to get the Indians and the Chinese to go as well. But, Paul, as he goes, he’ll be making a commitment that he can’t necessarily keep unless the Senate follows through.

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: Everyone understands that. And I just want to say, I’m surprised, George, that you lack faith in the power of the marketplace. All this cap-and-trade is about is putting a price on carbon emission, and people will do amazing things given a market incentive.

WILL: Speaking of the marketplace, the biggest industry in the world right now may be fighting climate change. There are billions, trillions of dollars on the table, and when you say, well, they are academics and they are scientists and they talk in funny ways — academics are human beings, and the enormous incentive to get on the bandwagon on global warming, the financial incentive, the market driving this, is huge.

KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter. It’s so much easier, come on. You got the energy industry’s behind it. There are 20 times as many believers as there are skeptics in the scientific community. They get almost equal time in the media.

(CROSSTALK)

WILL: Is there a larger venture capital firm in this country than the Energy Department of this government, which right now is sending out billions and billions of dollars in speculation on green energy?

ROBERTS: But I think that’s something that the American people want. I mean, we want green jobs. We don’t want to see those polar bears on those ice floes without any ice around them. All of that. I think, coming up with ways to have the energy that we use without causing global warming and polluting the air is something that is something desirable.

(CROSSTALK)

DOWD: I agree, the public wants that. But if Uncle Joe doesn’t have a job, they say let’s — don’t worry about the polar bears right now.