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In a perfect world, there are some areas for which we would no longer need a "debate" and could move on to finding solutions. The question of whether waterboarding is torture should not need debate. The question of global warming should not need debate. Global warming is real. The scientific community agrees--that is, those not on the payrolls of major polluters like Exxon.

But leave it to CBS and anchor Katie Couric to keep pushing the framing that the debate lies with the existence of global warming and its causes. And in the interest of "informing" the electorate (when in reality, they are simply retarding the discussion), Couric poses that question to the 10 major candidates. Of course, two of the candidates question global warming--Republican Fred "Why'd I wake up for this?" Thompson and Mike "I reject evolution, why not all other scientific documentation?" Huckabee.

Think Progress: Huckabee responds that "scientifically," he doesn't know whether global warming is "overblown." Thompson goes a step further, claiming that the "state of entitlements" and "extremists" who "want to do drastic things to our economy" are the real problems:

THOMPSON: There are a lot of unanswered questions. We don't know to the extent this is a cyclical thing. This may or may not effect very much. The extremists are the ones who want to do drastic things to our economy before we have more answers as to how much good we can do and whether people in the other parts of the world are going to contribute. It's the fact that our entitlements are bankrupting the next generation. We're spending the money of those yet to be born and we can't continue that way.

Thompson and Huckabee are wrong. The debate is over about whether manmade global warming is a threat. Even members of the Bush White House have admitted so.