Al Gore says global-warming skeptics are a group diminishing almost as rapidly as the mountain glaciers.

Myron Ebell begs to differ.

Hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, and droughts—sure, they've stirred some fears. And some corporate allies that used to mock global warming—such as Detroit's Big Three automakers and oil giant Texaco—have, like the glaciers, melted away from the fight. But, for the hardest of the hard core, these are glorious days.

Like holdouts in the Alamo, the last of the skeptics plug away at the thousands of mainstream scientists now arrayed against them. They take potshots at the scores of studies that say global warming is here, aiming for small incongruities. And they bridle when asked if they take money, as nearly all do, from ExxonMobil.

Many of the skeptics are curmudgeons: old, bald, and bitter. But not Myron Ebell. Tall, slim, and youthful at 53, his blond hair swept back from a handsome face set off by serious glasses, Ebell is one of that rare breed, an elegant nerd. On television, facing interrogation by moderators who clearly feel he should be tarred and feathered for his views, he stays cool and fires back with withering zingers. In the recent surprise hit movie Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's novel, actor Aaron Eckhardt played a tobacco lobbyist who jokes about being a merchant of death and gleefully outdebates all comers. Ebell could easily star in the sequel, Thank You for Warming.

Ebell is a public-policy wonk—not, he hastens to clarify, a lobbyist for the energy industry, as many of his fellow skeptics are, or a scientist whose research is underwritten by the energy industry, or a politician who takes contributions from the energy industry. He lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., where he and his wife are raising four children, ranging in age from an 11-year-old son to a 21-year-old daughter, all of whom, Ebell says proudly, take a skeptical view of global warming. He goes to work at a think tank on Connecticut Avenue called the Competitive Enterprise Institute (C.E.I.), where his office is modest, but not his influence.

Every day, journalists around the world call C.E.I. for its take on the latest global-warming studies, and Ebell, or one of his colleagues who also deal with the press—Marlo Lewis, Iain Murray, and Christopher Horner—happily obliges. The journalists like to air all views—"on the one hand, on the other"—so they plug in Ebell's latest retorts, giving them equal weight with new scientific findings. Gore is right in one sense: almost no scientist doubts that global warming is here, that man-made greenhouse gases are to blame, or that if we don't cut back on those gases fairly soon we'll be in a heap of trouble. But as the "other hand" in all those news stories, Ebell and his quotable cohorts sustain the impression that a scientific debate is still raging. The more studies that confirm global warming, the more ink Ebell gets. Journalist Ross Gelbspan, a longtime skeptic-tracker, says that's how the skeptics operate. With those doubts neatly planted in the press, the public shrugs, politicians push the problem off to another day, and ExxonMobil parries new fossil-fuel regulations, earning more windfall profits in exchange for a pittance to the skeptics and their work.

Like its ideological soulmates, C.E.I. has taken money—a considerable amount—from ExxonMobil. Ebell says that's irrelevant. "We're not beholden to our donors, because we don't say, 'If you give us this money, we'll do this project,'" he explains, tilting back nonchalantly in a C.E.I. conference-room chair. "I can't even quite tell you who supports us on global warming." In fact, Ebell could go to the ExxonMobil Web site and see that in 2005 the oil giant gave C.E.I. $270,000, a not inconsiderable portion of the institute's $3.7 million budget, and that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil gave it more than $2 million. He could also ask one of his colleagues and learn that C.E.I. gets money from the American Petroleum Institute, various pharmaceutical companies (Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly), and William A. Dunn of Dunn Capital Management. But he says he's never done that. Since its founding, 23 years ago, by free marketer Fred Smith as an all-purpose bullhorn against government regulations, C.E.I. has simply tinkered with issues it chooses—from higher mileage standards in cars (bad) to the Endangered Species Act (worse)—trying to affect public policy and hoping donors come along for the ride.