One of the world’s leading climate scientists, Michael Mann of Penn State, has been vindicated by the National Science Foundation. Almost no one noticed.

Ralph Hall (R-TX) is the unassuming new chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee. Like many Americans these days, Hall considers the pinnacle of American advancement in science and technology to be ‘splosions. There’s no way to read his praise of the BP oil spill – that’s not a typo, I wrote “praise” – in anything approaching a good way.

As David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin report in the Washington Post, despite the BP oil disaster, despite its direct ties to our addiction to oil, the spill has resulted in almost no groundswell for environmental change.

Question: What’s the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?

Answer: A used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

I was reminded of this old joke when reading Jim Hoggan’s book “Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming” on the campaign to obscure what science tells us about global warming: it’s happening and we’re causing it. Hoggan tells us about the cast of characters involved in this campaign and I found myself classiying them into two
categories: those who don’t know they are lying and those that do.

After a series of debacles, the WaPost should’ve barred George Will from ever writing about climate change again, but I guess, in the wake of CLIMATEGATE!11!, he can’t help himself.

It should be bizarre, but is in fact grimly typical, how the whole phony “climate-gate-scandal” has played out so far. Hundreds of emails between climate scientists were hacked — stolen — from servers at East Anglia University. The stolen materials were then misrepresented, distorted, and lied about, and the scientists involved abused, insulted, and accused of everything from deliberate fraud to acting as the willing dupes of the shadowy liberal-fascist “global warming industry.”