From one of the scientists at Real Climate, disgusted with something that occurred on CNN recently, saying that we need politicians who are both engaging and have a solid grasp of the science behind global warming to counter these jokers.

I think I know just the guy, ;-)... Calling Wes!

Here's what "raypierre" said in a comment (his response within the brackets):

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I like to debate the finer points of this subject, where there might be legitimate theories to explore and expand on, but when contrarians, either lay or scientist contrarians propose dumb ideas, they should be responded with the clearest logic possible. I see how bad ideas remain in the populace, how sound science gets buried, as another recent example, a contrarian proponent having the ears of millions suggests something really dumb like where are those 200,000 year old cars?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200606080005

The media outlet carrying this contrarian is of course not responsible for what he says, but may care about very basic science which just got trashed, no immediate scientific response is where they the contrarian gets away with transforming science into nonsense. AGW theory gets slashed 1000 times over before a response is done, and the dumb idea grows legs.

[Response: It's appalling that something like this would come from a CNN news host (Glenn Beck, albeit on his radio show rather than on CNN itself). I'd expect it from Fox or from Milloy, but that such bad science even gets play from CNN people is just awful. Not only does Beck compare Gore to Hitler, but he gets the science even more egregiously wrong than George Will or professional contrarians such as Pat Michaels. To begin with, Beck claims that because CO2 varied naturally in the past, there's no case for the present rise being due to human action -- a claim that is equivalent to casting doubt on the human cause of the recent CO2 rise. Even contrarians admit that there's no doubt about the human cause of the recent CO2 rise, at least when they are talking to people who are not completely naive. Beck further claims that if CO2 were to rise as much as Gore said it would, "then the temperature here on planet Earth will be about 400,000 degrees. We'll be the sun; we'll be the frickin sun. " -- a claim that is nowhere in Gore's movie or book, is utter nonsense scientifically, and was just made up out of whole cloth by Beck. (Even Venus, with a 90 bar CO2 atmosphere and being closer to the Sun is only 730K, and even if you took away the clouds and threw in another 90 bars of evaporated ocean you don't get much higher than a few thousand degrees) Awful.

I think the only way we are ever going to stamp out such nonsense is if there get to be charismatic media personalities that know the science needed to shoot down such nonsense, but also know how to present it in an engaging and entertaining way that makes people sit up and take notice. We also need politicians with similar abilities. We need to keep the discussion on a level of sound science, sure, but we need people who can make Beck look as ridiculous as he really is. Meanwhile, maybe it would help if people wrote to Beck, to CNN and to Premiere Radio Networks (which carries his radio show) to let them know how out of line he is. The relevant email addresses can be found in the MediaWatch link above --raypierre]