Vote for the Best Terrible Climate Writing of 2008

What do Salon.com social critic Camille Paglia, New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook, and Sen. Jim Inhofe all have on common?

...Okay, what else?

Well, they've each been nominated for an award for the best terrible science writing of 2008 by the liberal id-channelers at Poor Man Institute. 

Paglia was tapped for this uninformed chunk of prose from a February column:

On the climate-change front, Denis Dutton, founder of the superb Arts & Letters Daily Web site, has created a new site, Climate Debate Daily, as a forum for both sides in the ferocious controversy over global warming. The site's lucid dual format is exactly what has been needed to shed scholarly light on this heavily politicized battle, which has been very difficult to follow for everyone but fanatical true believers. Climate change, whether man-made or (as I think) natural, will remain a vital issue for decades simply because it is shaping or coercing government policy worldwide.

Poor Man's response?  "Thank God someone has finally taken this debate to the scholarly forum of the internets, where the time-tested analytical techniques of “fisking” and the “fact-checking of asses” can, at long last, be brought to bear.  And I must once again ask for a moment of silence to mourn the big tragic accident which killed all the world’s scientists, destroyed all their lives’ work, and left us in this nightmare world of pure opinion."

Easterbrook ducks and weaves by accepting the fact of human-caused global warming, but then writing it off compared to other global crises (as if it's ethically possible to choose one over another as more desperate):

Artificial climate change is real; even skeptics now call the danger scientifically proven. But Friedman, Al Gore, James Hansen of NASA, and others present climate change as some kind of super-ultra emergency. Global warming is a problem, one that must be managed via greenhouse-gas restrictions and a weaning away from fossil fuels. But in a world of poverty, disease, dictatorships, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, lack of girls' education, and more than 1 billion people without cleaning drinking water or electricity—climate change barely makes the Problem Top 10. 

By way of comparison to his tut-tutting on global warming, Easterbrook was quite in favor of entering crisis mode to prevent a giant asteroid from pulverizing the Earth, stop a small asteroid " if accelerated to 99 percent of light speed" from shattering the Earth, and raising the alarm that the Large Hadron Collider might blow up the Earth. 

But my pick is Sen. Jim Inhofe, for flat out lying on the floor of the Senate back in June that "everything" about global warming covered by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth ("that science-fiction movie") had been "refuted many times" by the very people who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the former vice president and senator:

Now Al Gore’s done his movie, almost everything that’s been in his movie, in fact everything has been refuted. And interestingly enough the IPCC on sea levels and other things, scare tactics, used in that science-fiction movie have been totally refuted and been refuted many times by the — by the IPCC.

Needless to say, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not refuted Gore, or its own findings, on "sea levels and other things."  Some researchers are suggesting that if anything, the IPCC's analyses about the negative impacts of global warming may understate the case. 

Read 'em all and vote at the Poor Man Institute.

Hat tip to David Robers at Gristmill for the link.

Image: Tornado, from NOAA Photo Library