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This kind of meaningless bloviation comes from the ideologically-driven disinformation machine so often that it's hardly worth highlighting here, except that this is a particularly egregious example of it. (And those of you who think I'm unfairly picking on the political right need only examine our coverage of the Thimerosal = Autism controversy and Genetically Modified Food issue to realize that the left is just as susceptible to this sort of nonsense, and just as wont to be called out by this publication.) Yesterday both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News reported that last year was so much cooler than previous years that it contravenes any evidence of Global Warming (or Climate Change, if you prefer.) Except that's expressly not true. As reported by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy: The latest round was brought to my attention from DarkSyde, a science blogger at DailyKos. In an article he put up last night, he notes that an online mag called Daily Tech has a blogger who is claiming that last year was cooler than average"¦ which contradicts a study by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies that shows that last year was among the hottest on record. Which one is right? Duh. NASA. The Daily Tech columnist evidently confused a below-average January temperature for an entire year's worth. UPDATE: Actually, the original post by Phil is incorrect - the columnist *did not* make the full year / January mistake alleged above. See the comments, below, for the full story. I regret the error - apologies to the original author, Michael Asher. However, I can't let him off the hook entirely, because Asher has a history of being a partisan in the global warming debate -- and not on the side of the overwhelming body of evidence. Doing a little digging via google reveals that on DailyTech.com he has a history of cherry-picking news reports and other findings for results that support his transparently denialist agenda. Originally I was going to say that it was the pundits who had used his original reporting who were at fault here, but it's clear they sourced him in the first place because he is, like them, hardly an unbiased source. -- Edited by Christie Nicholson at 02/29/2008 3:01 PM -- Edited by Christie Nicholson at 02/29/2008 3:53 PM
