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I've been trying to lay off giving any attention to the escalating attacks on Gore's movie coming from the Wall Street Journal's psycho Op-Ed page and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- led by that nutjob James Inhofe -- but it's getting out of hand.

A few weeks ago, MIT professor Richard Lindzen, who has shown before that having a job at MIT does not make one credible, wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal discrediting the science in An Inconvenient Truth. Among other things, Lindzen -- and WSJ by extension -- got Naomi Oreskes' name wrong (he called her Nancy). (Oreskes is the professor who had her students conduct a survey of scientific consensus which concluded that in general, climate experts believed that humans were warming the planet.)

Lindzen also claimed that, "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear."

I almost busted up laughing at that, but it's probably worth adding that Lindzen, as Ross Gelbspan wrote in a 1995 Harper's story (and later a book):

". . .charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC."

I won't spend more time debunking Lindzen's article -- David Roberts at Gristmill already did that well enough here.

But more recently, the senatorial freakshow that is Inhofe's office, under the name of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (for shame), has a press release out attacking Seth Borenstein's reporting for the Associate Press on scientific consensus vis-a-vis An Inconvenient Truth. It duplicates Lindzen's "Nancy" error, and refers twice to articles in a publication called the "Canadian Free Press."

It's the Canada Free Press. And it's a crazy right-wing tabloid.

And yet they're criticizing the AP's sourcing?

UPDATE: Oh, and by the way, the press release was scribbled by one Marc Morano (lots of fun things to do with that name, eh? That's probably why he emerged from high school damaged). You can read about this ultra-right wing former "journalist" and his truth-denying career here.

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