"Nah! That's a bunch of hooey!"

Pope Benedict XVI, famous the world over for his infallibility, has declared that concerns over global warming amount to undue alarmism.

Apparently, the pontiff's underlying point is that Earth never will become hotter than hell.

UPDATE: Hold on! This guy says the pope's position on global warming has been misrepresented. If so, The Rascal begs Benedict's forgiveness.

Big Al receives some kind of award or something

Global-warming deniers should not watch this video. They'll only become confused by the big words and the references to actual science:

The South will rise again -- or maybe not

This would serve them right.

'Inevitable human suffering'

This is pretty unsettling -- or at least it should be.

But we still have more than a few deniers (here and here and here and here) out there.

Flat-earthers easily conned

Rush Limbaugh, the radio blowhard who tells America's pinheads what to think, recently led a crowd of global-warming deniers in trumpeting a false study published on a fake Web site.

Details of the hoax can be found here and here and here.

Have sympathy for global warming skeptics

Gosh, I can't help but feel sorry for the few folks who are still skeptical of global warming reports. The poor bastards!

These people are forever looking for signs that the climate situation isn't as bad as Al Gore and his ilk make it out to be. And they're forever looking for evidence that the general public isn't buying the alarmism over global warming. Their quest on both counts, however, is futile.

Some of you may remember the fun we had with the deniers a few months ago when they got all excited about a poll indicating widespread skepticism about global warming -- only to have their enthusiasm dampened when it turned out that the poll was totally bogus.

Well, now they're facing even more discouraging news. There's a new BBC World Service poll -- an honest-to-God scientific survey -- showing that people all over the planet are convinced that human activity is contributing to global warming and want something done about it.

The question arises: What are the skeptics going to do now? Most climatologists disagree with them. Most of the world's population disagrees with them. The only people still on their side are the creationists, the Limbaugh dittoheads, the Fox News crowd and assorted other mouth-breathers.

The skeptics are left only with the barely comforting thought that when they're finally proven wrong on this climate-change thing beyond any doubt, the human race might well have been made extinct by then, thereby sparing these idiots the humiliation and derision they'll so richly deserve.

Pity them.

Global warming skeptics think the tables finally have been turned, but have they?

NASA has announced that some of its temperature data for previous years were skewed a bit because of a computer glitch.

Global warming skeptics have seized upon the issue as proof that the alarmism over climate change is greatly exaggerated, if not entirely discredited.

Here's perhaps the best single source for arguments on both sides of the matter. There are more than 130 comments on this piece, and some of them are quite arcane. But the reading is worth the effort.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has something to say on this subject. So do his commenters.

Global warming punishes Rockford, world

While cleanup crews here at the building that houses Rockford Rascal World Headquarters dealt with a watery basement Tuesday morning, large parts of the rest of the city struggled with far worse flooding conditions.

This was the second time in 11 months that Rockford has been struck by disastrous floods in the wake of torrential rains.

Meanwhile, a tornado touched down last night in Brooklyn, of all places. Snow fell in Argentina for the first time in 90 years. Hundreds of millions of people across the world have had to cope in recent days and weeks with unusual weather events of all kinds.

The situation was reported thusly today on an Irish Web site:

International flights were delayed and thousands of US commuters were unable to get to work today as torrential rain flooded New York's subways and rail lines.

The National Weather Service briefly posted a tornado warning for parts of the city and surrounding areas, including New Jersey, and fallen trees blocked streets in some neighbourhoods. The flash floods came as the weather service issued a heat advisory that warned temperatures could climb to 101F (38.3C) because of the muggy weather.

Elsewhere, a large section of the US suffered high temperatures and humidity and the elderly, children and those with health problems were warned to avoid prolonged periods and strenuous activity outdoors, drink plenty of water and wear light-coloured and loose-fitting clothing to prevent suffering a heat-related illness.

Yesterday, an expert with the UN weather agency said extreme weather events this year are in line with predictions made by an important report on climate change. Omar Baddour, a climatologist with the World Meteorological Organisation, said: "We can say that the start of the year 2007 was a very active year in terms of extreme climatic and meteorological events."

In May, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth report, warning that global warming would increase the number of extreme weather events and cause more natural disasters, which will hit the poor hardest.

Global surface temperatures in January were 3.4F (1.9C) higher than average since records began in 1880, with Europe experiencing an unusually mild winter, according to data compiled by WMO.

The Geneva-based agency said April temperatures around the world rose 2.46F (1.37C) above the historical average. Since then, record storms, floods and heat waves have occurred in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.

Hundreds have died and thousands have lost their livelihoods in floods since the start of the year in China, South Asia, Mozambique, Sudan and Uruguay, while the period from May to July was the wettest in England and Wales since records began in 1766, WMO said. It said two heat waves in south-eastern Europe in June and July broke previous records, with temperatures in Bulgaria hitting 113F (45C) on July 23.

Other extreme events this year include rare snowfall in South Africa and Argentina, and the first cyclone ever documented in the Arabian Sea, according to WMO.

But, of course, there are those who will deny that any of these events have anything to do with global warming, or they'll claim that climate change is only natural and is not caused by manmade greenhouse gases.

Fortunately, the cover story in the current edition of Newsweek is well timed. It's about the feverish effort of global warming deniers, many of whom are financed by polluters, to downplay the crisis.

Meanwhile, the evidence refuting their nonsensical claims continues to mount, here and elsewhere.

Global-warming skeptics get suckered

It's amazing what some people will seize upon in the debate over global warming.

Take, for instance, something that happened today:

The Drudge Report posted a link this morning under the headline: "Survey finds 71 % of people believe global warming 'natural occurence.'" In a flash, global-warming skeptics across the fruited plain clicked on the link and nearly soiled themselves in delight at the story they found on a British Web site.

Wow! Not only did 71 percent of respondents say that global warming is just natural stuff and isn't caused by humans, but 65 percent said the scare stories about the big environmental risks facing us are "far-fetched."

Glory be! The tide, it seems, has turned. People are waking up to the lies about global warming spread by those terrible liberals and that awful Al Gore and all those pointy-headed scientists.

The bloggers among the global-warming doubters who followed Drudge's link to this story began banging on their keyboards with great glee so as to spread the word. A guy named Kevin Tracy was one of them. A guy named Fritz Hereid was another. A guy named Tony Spain happily intrepreted the poll results as applying to people in general, not just the Brits.

In the next few days, word of this earth-shaking poll is likely to spread from sea to shining sea and far beyond.

But wait! There's...uh...one little problem. That survey of 4,000 people was conducted online. That means the respondents were self-selected. And that means the poll was worthless. You see, any poll that isn't conducted by time-tested scientific methods is ipso facto pure crapola, if you know what I mean.

Okay then, let's look at what the scientifically reliable polls are saying about global warming and how people feel about it. Well, gee, what a surprise! The results are completely different from those of the bogus poll touted on the Drudge Report. They show that clear majorities see global warming as a real problem and think it's been caused mostly by humans and want the government to do something about it.

Of course, these respectable polls only cover Americans. That other poll, the crappy one, apparently covers just British folks (although the story isn't really clear on that point). But then, it doesn't matter who's covered by the crappy poll. After all, crappy is crappy, right?

By the way, Kevin and Fritz and Tony might want to post corrections on their blogs. The Rascal will check back after a while to see if they've done so.

UPDATE: Peddlers of the bogus poll are multiplying like rabbits throughout the blogosphere -- here and here and here and here and here and here.

UPDATE II: The online poll at issue can be found here. Not only is it unscientific, but it's also skewed by skeptical statements about global warming.

UPDATE III: By the way, in a Harris poll earlier this year, global warming was blamed on governments, industries and people in general by 55 percent of British respondents, 61 percent of Spanish, 56 percent of French, 54 percent of Germans and Italians and 59 percent of Americans.

What global warming?

Oh, you mean the global warming that has placed the Earth in imminent peril and will require nothing short of a planetary rescue to save it from environmental cataclysm, according to this new report.

Well, why didn't you say so?

Does global warming imperil "Symbol"?

Just asking.

After all, lots of other cultural landmarks are said to be endangered by climate change.

Typical Drudge distortion

Under a headline reading "INTERNAL DEBATE AT 'WEATHER CHANNEL' OVER GLOBAL WARMING," the Drudge Report has a link this morning to this story from The New York Times.

But there's nothing in the Times' story about any "internal debate" at the Weather Channel. On the contrary, the network's people apparently are all on the same page regarding global warming.

What global warming?

Oh, you mean the global warming that melted away a chunk of ice in Antarctica that was the size of California.

What global warming?

Oh, you mean the global warming that requires immediate action, according to a vast majority of Americans (including even 60 percent of Republicans).

Increasingly, the global warming deniers among us find themselves isolated as a weird little band of kooks.

Even Frank Luntz, a Republican spinmeister who once encouraged the deniers, has come to recognize the disturbing reality of the situation.