Isn't making Inhofe look stupid rather like defeating a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest?

So, if he's that bad and embarrassing, why do they keep letting him on to spout his drivel?

Is he allowed to just demand air time? Surely not. So back to question #1.

Stupid shows and stupider people running them.

Spent the evening skiing with a friend who works at Accuweather. He says the meteorologists there say there is insufficient data to support anthropogenic global warming.

Shuster does okay from time to time. The real problem with these sorts of interviews is the constraints, particularly the time constraints of television news. Inhofe doesn't know what he is talking about. His report is strewn with shoddy errors, misrepresentations and inaccuracies such that it wouldn't be very difficult for someone of even moderate intelligence to completely demolish his entire project given say 30 minutes or so to flush out some of these issues. As it stands, the best we ever get is these sort of mini-outburst where Inhofe can defend himself and add support to his cause by referring to "facts" that the interviewer has little time or opportunity to dispute.

sjrsm wrote: "Spent the evening skiing with a friend who works at Accuweather. He says the meteorologists there say there is insufficient data to support anthropogenic global warming."

Your friend is wrong.

Whatever "meteorologists" he has spoken with who have told him "there is insufficient data to support anthropogenic global warming" are wrong.

Neither of these facts are particularly interesting.

And just remember the entire state of Oklahoma , all counties, voted against Obama .. yet keep electing the feeble fucking hemmoroid .. the very definition of STUPID ... what does this tell us about the people who live in that state ?

Yeah, what is wrong with that state? They voted almost two-to-one for that dipstick over Andrew Rice, a credible and attractive candidate who said and did all the right things.

sjrsm - Fess up, have you been doing the parodies of "Al"?

As to the accuweather people. they are all forecasters and for whatever reason, weather forecasters seem to be dug into the denial side. I am a recent graduate of a meteorology program and this is little doubt that there is warming and that humans are contributing. Inhofe recently lost his main sidekick on capital hill, Michael Chrichton, another eminently unqualified global warming expert. Our country is littered with "experts" in all kinds of fields with no background or proper education. Kind of baffling.

Is there a lot of lead contamination in Oklahoma water?

Shuster shouldn't mess with Freeman Dyson.

Steve Benen wrote: "As part of his long-time crusade to label global warming a 'myth,' Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), arguably the Senate's most unhinged member, has released yet another 'report' to bolster his arguments."

It isn't so much a matter of Inhofe being "unhinged", as that he is a bought-and-paid-for shill for the fossil fuel corporations, much like his partners-in-denial, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Inhofe "crusades" to label anthropogenic global warming a "myth" because that's what he is paid to do by the fossil fuel corporations.

Scott wrote: "... for whatever reason, weather forecasters seem to be dug into the denial side ..."

I can't count how many times I have heard or read a meteorologist proclaim "we can't predict the weather two weeks in advance, so it's absurd to think we can predict the climate years or decades in advance".

It's as though they really don't understand the difference between "weather" and "climate".

Imagine being the tv weather guy or gal. Day after day you get weather reports mostly kind of right, because weather IS difficult to predict. Imagine being the butt of jokes among friends and viewers for your repeated, visible failures.

Maybe the only reason we don't see meteorologists going postal, or developing high suicide rates comparable to dentists, is because they develop the cocky, ego-saving stunt of trying to generalize their limitations to real climatologists. Hey, if those guys can't predict anything either, then the weathercritter isn't such a failure after all, right?

Did inhofe publish a request for scientists on his web site like boehner has done with economists?

Is Al Roker's name on the list? He's the only person I trust on this issue.

"Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), arguably the Senate's most unhinged member"

If you exclude senators with a wide stance or a no-hitter. Certainly, the competition is strong.

I can't count how many times I have heard or read a meteorologist proclaim "we can't predict the weather two weeks in advance, so it's absurd to think we can predict the climate years or decades in advance".

Similarly, since I can't predict whether I'll be dead two weeks from now, it's absurd for me to predict whether I'll be dead two hundred years from now....

Inhofe never said that global warning is a myth. He said that catastrophic global warning is a myth (ie: human extinction, end of civilization, etc). In this he is correct.

This lie is repeated endlessly by leftists.

Lists of 'experts' with no credentials are a well-known ploy among creationists. When the names are filtered to include only those who

1. Have a PhD in a relevant field
2. Are actually employed by the institution cited in the list
3. Actually want to be on the list

You pare the list down to only a few people, all of whom are recognized as crackpots.

Deep thought

Wasilla has a lot of transplanted socially conservative Oklahomans drawn north by the oil fields.

Inhofe is to intellectual rigor, what the movie "Schindlers List" is to comedy.

It's a testament to the sad state of TV Journalism that such a shitty interview can be - deservedly - held up as a massive improvement on what you normally see coming out of TV newsrooms, because it actually is.

OTOH, it just boggles the mind that the interviwer chose to pick out as an example of 'crazy, out-there types' agreeing with Inhofe's BS, someone who wants to power spaceships with nuclear detonations.

Because, uh, that's actually one of our best prospects for a long-term solution to the problem of maintaining an industrial civilisation minus oil. We spend our money on smart things like building an infrastructure outside of Earth's atmosphere and use it as a base to send off fleets of nuclear-powered platforms to source our minerals and energy from the rest of the Solar System. The technoligy is already there, only thing stopping us doing it at any point over the last 40 years or so has been politics.

Meaning, nobody would trust anyone else doing it first, because putting nuclear weapons in space basically makes you King of the Hill as far as nuclear war is concerned.

International co-operation anyone? I hear it's about to come back into fashion in a very big way.

"technoligy"?

Just the very best word to spell wrong. Please forvige em.

it's absurd to think we can predict the climate years or decades in advance.

30+ years ago the consensus forecast was that global cooling would be so severe by now that millions more would be dying of starvation due to crop failures. That consensus was quite wrong, so it was replace by the consensus that we face catastrophic global warming.

But the 2007-2008 winter in the Northern Hemisphere was unusually cold, producing the first growth of Alaskan glaciers since the 70s. Beijing has just suffered the coldest December day in 50+ years, confirming last year's unusually heavy snowfall as a harbinger of change. The Arctic ice mass froze more quickly in late 2008 than it has in decades. As it has recently, the Antarctic continued in winter 2008 to show more ice accumulation than previously recorded. It appears that the world is back to where it was in the 70s when the consensus was for catastrophic cooling: as cool as it was then and on a downward trajectory.

Meanwhile, buy your CO2 offsets. You don't have to wait for government action to have a beneficial impact.

" 30+ years ago the consensus forecast was that global cooling would be so severe by now that millions more would be dying of starvation due to crop failures. That consensus was quite wrong, so it was replace by the consensus that we face catastrophic global warming."

My apologies. I have never seen the list of peer reviewed publications supporting the idea of imminent global cooling from that time, nor do I remember seeing any then. Could you post the list? I assume you have it handy.

MatthewRMarler, I do hope you realize that the fact that the Arctic ice mass froze more quickly in late 2008 than it has in decades might have something to do with that it also had melted to the smallest amount ever in the summer.

It is similar to saying that the economy is in perfect health because recently we had a day with record breaking point growth on the DOW, while ignoring that it's still down several thousand point from where it was last year.

MatthewRMarler, your comment at 3:17PM is, to be as polite as possible, a load of horse shit.

There was no "consensus forecast" thirty years ago that "global cooling would be so severe by now that millions more would be dying of starvation due to crop failures."

That is, very simply, a LIE. As a matter of fact, the scientific community was well aware of the danger of global warming and climate change from anthropogenic CO2 emissions even earlier than that, and President Lyndon B. Johnson even spoke of the issue in the 1960s.

And your account of the 2007-2008 winter is similarly full of falsehoods and irrelevancies.

The observed trend of rapid and extreme warming of the last 50 years continues. The warming has not "stopped". It has not "slowed down". It has not "reversed". The fact that winter is cold does not mean that the Earth is "cooling".

Those are all LIES, told to you by people who want to deceive you for their own reasons, and who are counting on you being so lazy and so ideologically programmed that you won't bother to do the simple, fairly easy fact-checking that would show you that those claims are false.

As for the LIES about Arctic ice that you mindlessly regurgitated, the facts are quite the opposite:

More than two trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming ...

Senator Inhofe is paid a lot of money for spreading the fossil fuel industry's self-serving, pseudoscientific propaganda and nonsensical lies.

What do you get for doing it? A nice warm feeling, knowing that in your own small way you are helping to protect ExxonMobil's hundreds of billions of dollars in profits at the expense of destroying the capacity of the Earth to support life? Or perhaps just the thrill of annoying "liberals"?

Marler, your post was such utter and complete unscientific crap it is unworthy of the minimum bother necessary to refute it.

However, I'd love you to try and cite a "consensus" for your assertion about the "global cooling craze" in the 1970's -- because there was none. Ethan and ernst have you dead to rights.

Makes for an imperious tone with which to dismiss climate change with a wave of your hand, though. All this crude, flopsy science -- it's hardly worth our time!

@ matthewrmarler:

Read and learn, if by some chance you're of the learnin' sort:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/the_australians_war_on_science_29.php#more

And if not, collect your nickel for that helpful post.

Secular,

Thanks for the dissection of Matthew. I did my undergraduate in meteorology in the 80's and there was a lot of talk about man made warming and even a published book, so obviously the science goes way back. This constant canard about cooling is taken from a time cover-story and the continued absurdity of citing isolated events to make your case has to stop.

Inhofe is an idiot and yet 67% of the voters in this whacked state voted for him----AGAIN!!

It's so frustrating living here.

It's so frustrating living here.
Posted by: HopefulOkie on December 23, 2008 at 9:11 PM | PERMALINK

Okie, I can understand your frustration. A good friend of mine grew up in Detroit, went to college in Minneapolis -- two relatively progressive areas -- and then moved to Tulsa to be near her estranged father.

As a fairly intellectual person and a progressive she really did not fit in. She worked for a non-profit so people knew her politics and pigeon-holed her, to the point of introducing her as their "liberal friend." Even picking up a bit of the accent again didn't help. She eventually got so crazed she left behind free room and board to return to the Midwest.

Every region, every place has its own kind of nuttiness, though. We just get used to a certain kind and prefer it over others.

It's not really Inhofe's list, it belongs to his mad elf, Marc Morano and it really is an 8th grade cut and paste job

Inhofe is proof that the term "dumb fucking Okie" is not a slur in at least one case, but rather a description of reality.