President Bush has been running from the issue of global warming for four years, but the walls are closing in. Scientists throughout the world are telling him that the rise in atmospheric temperature justifies aggressive action. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other prominent Republicans are telling him to get off the dime. His corporate allies are deserting him. And the Senate is inching closer to endorsing a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

A result is that Mr. Bush seems increasingly isolated and his rhetoric of denial increasingly irrational. Last week, a whistleblower asserted that a senior White House official, formerly an oil lobbyist, had changed scientific reports to minimize the climate problem. The official, Philip Cooney, resigned last Friday, although the White House insisted that the embarrassing disclosures had nothing to do with his departure. Whatever the truth, this was hardly the first time Bush officials cooked the books for political ends. It was just this kind of nonsense that persuaded an exasperated Christie Whitman to return to private life.

Out in the real world, hardly anyone denies the importance of the issue anymore. Just over a week ago, Mr. Schwarzenegger pledged to slow, stop and ultimately reverse California's greenhouse gas emissions by requiring big improvements in automobile efficiency and pushing for energy sources other than fossil fuels. "The debate is over," the governor said. "We know the science, we see the threat, and we know the time for action is now."

As if on cue, the National Academy of Sciences and 10 of its counterparts around the world declared that the science of global warming is clear enough to warrant prompt reductions in greenhouse gases. Mainstream scientists have long accepted the link between warming and human activity. What made this statement exceptional was its tone and its timing, coming a month before Mr. Bush and other leaders from the Group of 8 industrialized nations are to meet in Gleneagles, Scotland, where Prime Minister Tony Blair will put climate change near the top of the agenda.

As things stand now, Mr. Bush will be going to that meeting empty-handed, despite Mr. Blair's efforts last week to make him take the issue more seriously. Perhaps the Senate can give him something positive to point to, although it will have to act fast. Three different global warming proposals requiring mandatory controls on carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, could surface as amendments during the forthcoming debate on the energy bill, scheduled to begin in earnest this week.

One of these, the McCain-Lieberman bill, received a surprising 43 votes in October 2003. That was before the rest of the world began moving toward mandatory controls and before American power companies began to slowly accept that such controls were not only inevitable but also necessary to spur the development of more efficient ways of producing energy.

The results could be better this time. There is speculation that a less ambitious but also less costly bill sponsored by Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, and modeled after proposals from the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, could win a filibuster-proof 60 votes. That may be a long shot. But what is clear is that the warming issue is gaining traction at home and abroad, inspired partly by Mr. Bush's incorrigible stubbornness.