NASA's James Hansen is looking to stir up trouble at a coal mining facility in West Virginia, and the CEO of the company about to be marched on isn't taking it lying down.

Quite the contrary, Massey Energy's Don L. Blankenship, whose company is set to be protested by Hansen and actress Daryl Hannah this coming Tuesday, has challenged the NASA official to debate him about global warming and West Virginia's economy.

As reported by WOWKTV.com Sunday, Blankenship issued the following statement concerning the matter:

ABC News is giving away free advertising! Or Sam Champion is, anyway. On the June 18 edition of “Good Morning America” the weatherman-when-he’s-not-busy-saving-the-planet did his best to help DVD sales of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” and then proceeded to rave about Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisor’s new “Carbon Counter.” DBCCA is a commercial concern, as is Al Gore. If other members of the global warming industrial complex get wind of this, ABC may have to make good.

Champion still hasn’t gotten over Gore’s 2006 movie and explained, “It’s the movie where he stood beside this giant graphic and rose on a scissor lift … [he] showed you how our rapid rise in fossil fuels would just go off the charts in greenhouse gases,” he reminisced. But the good times aren’t over, according to Champion. “Well there’s a whole new way to count this and what it will do to our planet if we don’t make some substantial changes.”

Jack Cafferty seems a bit bitter.  He apparently hasn’t gotten over Al Gore losing Florida in the 2000 election.  

On today’s CNN Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, guest analyst Rob Sobhani briefly mentioned that the democratic process in Iran would be a bit like if the American Supreme Court chose who would be allowed to run for President:

ROB SOBHANI: Well for your viewers, I think the best example is if the Supreme Court of America decided who’s going to run for office.  And that’s exactly what happened in Iran, the council of guardians decided that Mr. Mousavi, Karroubi, Rezaee, and Ahmadinejad were going to run.  So in essence, it is not democratic, but the process ends up being democratic.  And that’s the dilemma of the United States right now.

Immediately after this, Sobhani was dismissed, and Cafferty introduced.  Blitzer wondered aloud if the recent Iranian elections could possibly incite a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution – but Cafferty was not satisfied with that historical comparison:

It is "an inconvenient truth" for Al Gore that the world is currently experiencing some of the coldest weather in decades. Just how cold? How about snow in Saudi Arabia in May according to this report?

According to a story in the Saudi Gazette and sourced to the American News Agency, the Associated Press, snow fell in Al-Baha city, to the south-west of Riyadh, on Tuesday.

Torrential rain poured down on Al-Baha accompanied by gusty winds.

The nearby mountains received some snow too.

It covered the valley areas and the forests of Al-Zaraeb and Khayrah, according to the report.

If this were the only such  report, it could be written off as just an isolated incident of freak weather. Unfortunately for Al Gore's credibility there have been widespread reports of unseasonably cold weather from many sources including a story yesterday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a "year without summer."

In today's "Why Didn't Al Gore Think of That?" moment, a Russian climatologist is claiming global warming might have played a significant role in bringing down Air France flight 447 on Monday.

With this revelation, the list of things climate change is supposed to be responsible for has officially surpassed the list of things it's NOT been blamed for.

As hysterically reported by Russia Today Thursday (h/t Marc Morano):

For years, NewsBusters has asked the question: when will media report Nobel Laureate Al Gore's global warming profit motive?

On Monday, Reuters did.

In an article titled "Gore-backed Hara Sees Profit from Low-carbon Economy," author David Lawsky went where most climate change obsessed media members dare not (h/t Steven Milloy):

On March 26, I was watching the Kids’ Choice Awards with my 8-year-old twins on Viacom’s Nickelodeon, which for 30 years has been the No. 1 entertainment brand for kids. It was dedicated to the Big Green Help environmental campaign and “going green” for Earth Day awareness. Leonardo DiCaprio was honored for his green work. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson was the host, and my fellow Hollywood stars and musicians came out in full force.

An impressive commitment was shown to keeping the message of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as a battle cry for our youths’ participation in protecting Mother Earth from global warming and pollution. My children were enthusiastic. I was confused. Something bothered me, and I could not put my finger on why - until Memorial Day weekend.

It started on Saturday morning, when I took my 8-year-old son, Nicholas, who is a Cub Scout, to the Los Angeles National Cemetery. About 2,700 Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, from Cub to Eagle, convened to place flags on more than 84,000 gravesites of America’s finest. It was a moving, profound experience.

One of the tricks in the global warming alarmist playbook over the years has been to show how global warming will cause sea levels to rise and flood the low-lying coastal areas where population centers happen to be, specifically lower Manhattan in New York City.

However, the imagery used by Al Gore in his "An Inconvenient Truth" and by various other global warming made-for-television specials isn't scientifically accurate according to Bjørn Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming."

Lomborg was asked by Gene Epstein in the May 18 issue of Barron's if it would be "smart to prevent global warming as soon as possible -- to avoid seeing Manhattan under 20 feet of water in ten years?"

CNN anchor John Roberts failed to catch former Vice President Al Gore make a significant exaggeration about his criticism of the Bush administration in its early years during an interview on Friday’s American Morning. When asked about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent criticism of the Obama administration, Gore claimed that he had “waited two years after I left office to make statements that were critical, and then of the policy.” In reality, he made a significant policy speech denouncing the Bush administration’s pre-war policy towards Iraq in September 2002. CNN itself reported on the speech, which was made in San Francisco in front of the Commonwealth Club. Later, when Gore said that he didn’t “want to get dragged into an argument with Dick Cheney about what he’s getting into,” Roberts joked sarcastically, “Oh, Mr. Vice President, you know I would never try to do that with you.”

Roberts’s taped interview of Gore aired in three parts, and his questions to Gore about Cheney came during the second part, which began at the bottom half of the 7 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program. The anchor asked the former vice president, “You were a big critic of the previous administration, particularly in the run-up to the war and thereafter. What do you think of Vice President Cheney’s statements that the Obama administration’s policies are leaving this country less safe?”

As Geoffrey Dickens reported earlier, Chris Matthews attacked Goveror Sarah Palin for hiring a ghostwriter for her upcoming book deal. In like fashion, Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp Blog has also gotten into Laugh-at-Palin's-book mode and you can bet that this will be the scoff du jour among the left-media. But, the thing that proves the Old Media's hypocrisy and partisanship is this "collaborator" angle. The media are going nuts that Palin is working with what is essentially a ghostwriter -- though an upfront one, not a hidden one -- and acting as if this is somehow unusual. But it simply is not.

Few politicians that have books published under their name ever themselves put pen to paper. Politicians are generally not writers and it is completely common that they hire actual writers to do the heavy lifting of composing their book. But here is both Matthews and Silva acting as if Palin is the only one ever to do it.

Two days after the death of G.O.P. icon Jack Kemp, Newsweek Senior Editor Michael Hirsh posted a classless obituary on Monday, "The Dangers of Amateurism," calling the football player, politician, and self-taught economist Kemp an "amateur econo-cultist."

One does not want to be disrespectful of the dead, and Jack Kemp was an admirable man in many ways. If the Republican Party had only followed his advice about reaching out to the inner cities and underclass -- and ignored his happy talk about supply-side economics -- the GOP might not be in nearly the fix it is today. Unfortunately the opposite happened. Kemp, a consummate professional as a football player, was a classic case of an amateur econo-cultist whose understanding never reached quite deep enough. In mid-life, when he decided to switch from sports to politics, Kemp became enamored of simplistic free-market ideas, in particular a toxic combination of Arthur Laffer and Ayn Rand. He then sold another gifted amateur, Ronald Reagan, on the idea that drastic tax cuts would so stimulate the economy that the ensuing growth would more than make up for the loss in revenues....Kemp was such an economic purist -- i.e., amateur -- that he argued with Reagan himself a number of times when the president decided that perhaps he'd cut taxes enough.

Any measure that we look at shows Al Gore's losing at the moment. The public is just not that concerned.

So said Gallup Poll editor Frank Newport about the Nobel Laureate's campaign to convince Americans that man's carbon dioxide emissions are destroying the planet.

As reported by U.S. News & World Report's Paul Bedard at his Washington Whispers blog Tuesday:

For several years NewsBusters has been informing readers of Nobel Laureate Al Gore's profit motive as it pertains to his advancement of global warming hysteria.

This included the presentation of a video of the former Vice President disclosing in March 2008 what investments he's personally made in companies that will benefit from any legislation designed to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

This admission garnered virtually no mainstream media coverage from global warming obsessed press members when it was first uncovered last April.

So great is their devotion to this cause that when Gore was asked about his financial interests in pending cap and trade legislation at a recent hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (video embedded right), his heated exchange with a representative from his home state went completely ignored by America's television news divisions until conservative radio host Laura Ingraham and Climate Depot's Marc Morano discussed it on Friday's "O'Reilly Factor" (video and transcript embedded below the fold followed by additional comments on the subject): 

In today's You Really Can't Make This Stuff Up moment, the New York Times has issued a correction to a front page article that was highlighted by Nobel Laureate Al Gore in his recent climate change testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 24.

Here's what Gore said that day (video embedded right, relevant section at 1:40):

Sen. Warner made reference in his opening statement to the story on the front page of the New York Times this morning. Absolutely incredible. The largest corporate carbon polluters in America, 14 years ago, asked their own people to conduct a review of all of this science. And their own people told them, “What the international scientific community is saying is correct, there is no legitimate basis for denying it.” Then, these large polluters committed a massive fraud far larger than Bernie Madoff’s fraud. They are the Bernie Madoffs of global warming. They ordered the censoring and removal of the scientific review that they themselves conducted, and like Bernie Madoff, they lied to the people who trusted them in order to make money.

Eight days later, Marc Morano reported at Climate Depot that the Times has issued a correction: 

One of the latest tactics some global warming alarmists have employed is to compare their activism to struggles of the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. Actor Edward Norton compared the "symbolic" Earth Hour of March 29 to infamous Selma's "Bloody Sunday" in an appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live," and again on NBC's "Today."

But this time, one of the movement's leaders, former Vice President Al Gore, made a similar comparison. Testifying for before a congressional committee on April 24 in Washington, D.C., Gore rated his activism to that of the civil rights movement.

"I believe this legislation has the moral significance equivalent to that of the civil rights legislation of the 1960's and the Marshall Plan of the late 1940's," Gore said. "I am here today to lend my support to one of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced in the Congress."

Despite years of hysterical, Al Gore-loving media hype that humans are destroying the planet by emitting too much carbon dioxide, more Americans now believe global warming is being caused by long-term planetary forces rather than man's activities.

This represents a stunning reversal in the past twelve months, and is likely a function of a recent global cooling that has thwarted efforts by climate alarmists to convince citizens that the warming trend that began in the mid-'70s was going to continue forever if the world didn't immediately stop burning fossil fuels.

Now, according to Rasmussen Reports, those believing man can actually control the planet's thermostat have plummeted in number:

CRITICAL UPDATES at end of post!

Joe Romm's debate defeat tour hysterically continued Thursday when he went against his own decree forbidding further references to Marc Morano at his Climate Progress blog by eviscerating the New York Times for having the nerve to write about -- wait for it! -- Marc Morano.

Oh the humanity!

In a tirade that would most certainly make Tonya Harding proud, Romm scolded Times author Leslie Kaufman in a piece deliciously titled "In a stunning journalistic lapse, the NY Times gives credulous coverage to Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano, the Jayson Blair of global warming":

Remember when the alarmists were taking the premise that anthropogenic global warming was more of a threat to the planet than just polar bears and penguins, but also sea levels and catastrophic weather patterns?

Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief of the Slate Group and author of "The Bush Tragedy," presents seven things taken for granted that might not be completely correct in a column for the April 13 issue of Newsweek.

"A lot of premises have turned out to be wrong lately," Weisberg wrote. "I'm not talking about evanescent bits of conventional wisdom, but about overarching assumptions that were widely shared across the political spectrum."

Video Below Fold

It is always interesting to see the Democratic pot calling the Republican kettle black and here we have only the latest example of that with Obama's top advisor attacking former Vice President Dick Cheney for his outspoken position on the failures of the Obama administration's early efforts in office. But, as advisor David Axelrod was attacking Cheney, there doesn't seem to be any memory on the part of CNN or Axelrod of the wild-eyed, fire-breathing attacks made by former Vice President Al Gore on President George W. Bush in the years after the 2000 election.

On CNN's State of the Union with host John King, David Axelrod scolded Dick Cheney for not behaving like a "statesman" over the former vp's statements that the country is becoming less safe because of Obama's policies.

No environment-related historical myth seems stronger than the one claiming that if it weren't for the Republican Congress in the late 1990s and President George W. Bush after that, the US would have ratified the Kyoto Treaty and would be under mandatory strictures designed to combat alleged "global warming" -- which, as frequently noted here and elsewhere, has been, depending on the source referenced, on hiatus for eight years to over a decade.

In an article about the Obama administration's upcoming involvement in international negotiations about so-called "climate change" after what he calls "eight years on the sidelines" ("US takes new climate change agenda to global talks"), the Associated Press's Dina Capiello continued the wire service's dishonorable long-term perpetuation of the GOP-bad, Dems-good myth (just a few previous posts on other AP examples are here, here, and here at NewsBusters; here, here, and here at BizzyBlog) by writing that:

And unlike 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was drafted, there is now a Democratic-controlled Congress moving to embrace mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.

Yeah, if it weren't for those nasty Republicans, Bill Clinton and Al Gore would have gotten Kyoto ratified, and all would be right with the world.

Uh, not exactly.

If you needed some good news to brighten your Saturday evening, this could be it: ABC's George Stephanopoulos believes Democrats have abandoned their goal of enacting a carbon cap and trade program this year.

For those unfamiliar, this is a scheme backed by global warming alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore designed to place prohibitive taxes on emitters of that dastardly carbon dioxide.

Most rational economists not under Gore's influence believe such a plan would have a devastating effect on our economy, and would likely force companies to continue exporting manufacturing jobs to countries like China and India which don't have such business unfriendly practices.

Fortunately, according to Stephanopoulos, this idea has been scrapped for the time being (h/t Hot Air): 

When a high-profile government employee goes overseas claiming "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," should the American news media take notice.

After all, such was uttered Wednesday by NASA's James Hansen, one of the world's foremost climate alarmists who is disgusted by the fact that democratically elected governments aren't completely buying into his junk science concerning anthropogenic global warming.

As a result, he's not only advocating acts of civil disobedience here in America, but he is also in England to participate in a protest at the Coventry headquarters of power firm E.ON.

Makes one wonder if our tax dollars paid for his trip.

As the British Guardian reported Wednesday:

A record-high number of Americans now believe the media are exaggerating the seriousness of global warming.

Coming weeks after President Barack Obama proposed a cap-and-trade strategy to curb supposedly harmful carbon dioxide emissions, one has to wonder how much press attention this just-released Gallup poll will garner.

After all, the numbers go quite counter to Nobel Laureate Al Gore's claims of a consensus concerning this matter:

BMI's Dan Gainor has a great column on the Fox Forum about the silence around "global cooling."

This is the winter of environmentalists’ discontent. They desperately want the earth to be warming to prove Al Gore’s truth inviolate and they are going to make you pay thousands of dollars for it no matter whether it’s true or not.

But the weather has been inconveniently cold. Thirty-two states have experienced record or near-record lows this winter – poking holes in the predictions of imminent fiery doom. Just ask the die-hard global warming activists who showed up in Washington last week to protest the nation’s use of coal. Their event was hampered by nearly a foot of snow in the nation’s capital – enough to freeze out luminaries like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Still, there they were, a couple thousand idiots standing in a winter wonderland, chanting about global warming. What’s amazing is that NASA’s climate chief James Hansen was part of this foolishness. Here we have a man who the left keeps telling us is so smart we need to listen to everything he says and he doesn’t have the public relations sense of a freshman communications major.

I have a news flash for Mr. Hansen – it gets cold in the winter. Sometimes it snows – even in Washington. If you want to promote global warming, look at a thermometer and wait until that red stuff climbs up real high.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) participated in a conference call with a number of bloggers on Wednesday.

On the agenda was the Fairness Doctrine, and what the Senator believes the Democrats have up their sleeves to attack conservative talk radio.

Also on the docket was an update on the potential for a carbon cap-and-trade scheme to be enacted by this Congress, and what Republicans are going to do to try to rein in spending (30-minute audio available here).

On March 10, conservative author Ann Coulter will debate liberal comedian Bill Maher at the Citi Performing Arts Center in Boston.

Sadly, the facility only seats 3,600 people, for this event, ironically organized by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, is sure to be a hot ticket given the fiery personalities involved.

As reported by the Eagle-Tribune Sunday:

A Japanese energy commission released a report last month challenging the supposed international consensus that man is responsible for warming the planet while claiming that climate modeling -- the questionably accurate process of predicting the future so key to Nobel Laureate Al Gore's myth -- is immature and akin to ancient astrology.

The study also called the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusion that global temperatures are likely to continue to rise "an unprovable hypothesis," while castigating "the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis." 

The Japan Society of Energy and Resources was founded in 1980 to "promote the science and technology concerning energy and resources and thus to facilitate cooperation among industry academia and governmental sectors for coping with the problems in this field."

On Wednesday, the UK Register published a translation of the Society's January report which for some reason America's global warming-obsessed press chose to ignore:

Climate realists won a huge battle with Global Warmingist-in-Chief Al Gore when the former Vice President pulled a new slide he recently added to his now famous -- or, more to the point, infamous! -- presentation linking an increase in natural disasters to "climate change."

As the New York Times' Andrew Revkin reported moments ago:

The graph, which was added to his talk last year, came just after a sequence of images of people from Iowa to South Australia struggling with drought, wildfire, flooding and other weather-related calamities. Mr. Gore described the pattern as a manifestation of human-driven climate change. “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented,” he said.

According to Revkin, this slide has now been nixed:

NASA's James Hansen has created an advertisement for a protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C., on March 2.

In the piece, Hansen claims:

We cannot burn all the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon and that is coal.

Is this what someone working for the United States government and paid with our tax dollars should be doing (video embedded below the fold):

How often do you see someone on television deride media darlings Al Gore and Paul Krugman in virtually the same sentence?

Not often, right?

Well, on Monday's "Situation Room," CNN contributor Alex Castellanos deliciously did exactly that, and actually evoked some nervous laughter from studio members (video available here, partial transcript follows):