video There's just something about climate debates that seems to convince long-forgotten 90s icons they deserve a political platform upon which to preach their ideas. Last week, we saw the unfortunate politicization of Bill Nye the Science Guy-- yes, the one who taught you what cells were before you got yelled at by The Chief on Carmen Sandiego-- prompt an inevitably feud between Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow. Next up to bat is rapper Biz Markie, whose one-hit wonder "Just a Friend" made him a household name in 1989. Markie, who was thought to have retired into obscurity long ago, surfaced today on the pages of Politico to support green energy initiatives that promote a healthier environment and deter the acceleration of climate change. What? (more...)

video Ok. Well this should clear things up somewhat for those folks out there who are confused as to what side of the climate change debate Glenn Beck falls on. He apparently thinks it's merely another conspiracy theory. Last week Beck got into a rather heated exchange with Rachel Maddow ostensibly over climate change. Short version: Beck denied ever saying this winter's snow wasn't a symptom of climate change, Maddow pointed out he had, many times. (more...)

Thomas Friedman might be the New York Times' most-ridiculed columnist. Certainly the backlash against him is the most vehement, evident in this hilarious-but-over-the-top piece by Matt Taibbi from the New York Press last year. Friedman is also a frequent target of the NYT Picker blog, a site we firmly believe one shouldn't mess with. Friedman's latest column appeared today in the NYT print edition and addresses his topic of choice, climate change. Unfortunately, it will do little to quiet criticism of him. (more...)

On Friday's episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, the host took a few minutes to politely disagree with Glenn Beck's views on global warming, including his refuting of Maddow's guest Bill Nye the Science Guy. "Next up, a correction," Maddow explained, motioning with her hand to indicate that Beck's radio show is increasingly cuckoo. "Who has claimed that this snow storm is proof that global warming doesn't exist?" Beck asked after mocking Nye with interjections of "Oh boy" and "Seriously?" on his radio show. "Who's claimed that? Dude, you have... a lot," Maddow responded before playing two clips of Beck laughing about global warming, including a joke that the snow is also burying Al Gore's global warming theory. "Who has claimed that?" Maddow repeated, playing a similar clip of Sean Hannity. "It is one thing to be outrageously wrong about facts and science, but the price of that is getting made fun of for it and getting called out on it -- boom! -- by Bill Nye the Science Guy," Maddow concluded. Check out the clip below:

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Rachel Maddow takes no prisoners. Infuriated by the gratuitous right-wing jubilation that the massive Northeast snowstorms completely expose global warming as a hoax, Maddow took the liberty of making a series of analogies ranging from basketball to tadpoles to winning the lottery to disprove that connection. Short version of her argument: anomalies exist. But just to assure the audience that her point was absolutely irrefutable, she brought an absolutely irrefutable personality on the air to agree with her: beloved childhood icon Bill Nye the Science Guy. (more...)

video Yesterday, Representative Joe Barton, known to his critics as "Smokey Joe" for his staunchly free-market, anti-regulation stance on corporate pollution, went on C-SPAN to discuss ... wait for it ... Climategate. The Climategate affair, and the public skepticism about man-made global warming that it has helped produce, have to be a small triumph for a man who has been a staunch skeptic since before it was fashionable. (more...)

It’s the weekend, which means it’s time to separate the chumps from the champs in Mediaite’s “Winners and Losers” — our scorecard of who rocked and who flopped in the week’s headlines.

You've no doubt heard the story by now: hackers recently got hold of a bunch of emails from some climate scientists and the University of Anglia. So now some have decided these emails are the smoking gun to some grand global warming conspiracy, cooked up just for sport. And the controversy broke just in time for the Copenhagen summit!

So who are the Winners and Losers of the Climategate scuttlebutt? (more...)

video John Stossel's new Fox Business Network premiered last night, and despite the initial reports it would be about "Atlas Shrugged," it instead focused on climate change. As expected, there wasn't much of a business angle to it. But it did allow Stossel to flex his full libertarian muscles, with a thoughtful show that took a single issue on in depth. (more...)

video The Climategate affair continues to move from fringe Internet cause to mainstream debate. Case in point: CNN is talking about it more and more. The network is often accused of waffling in its reporting and failing to come to strong conclusions -- and this accusation, in turn, is often linked to CNN's disappointing ratings. But their latest piece on the hackers behind Climategate was anything but waffly: it was, in the lingo of climate change skeptics, 'warmist,' all but putting its foot down and calling global warming an undisputed fact. (more...)

In preparation for President Obama's upcoming visit to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, environmental activist group Greenpeace and tcktcktck.org have rolled out an ad campaign that has some chilling elements. While the right constantly accuses the President of apologizing now, Greenpeace predicts Obama will be sorry in 2020 if he doesn't save the world in Copenhagen. He'll also be about 70 by then, apparently, and just entering his 4th term.  (Just kidding. Or am I?) (more...)

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Climategate has slowly but steadily bubbled up from fringe meme on the Internet to hot-button political and scientific cause. Do a set of emails from a hacked climate research server show that global warming is a hoax, or at least an overstatement?

On This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Paul Krugman contended that there was "not a single smoking gun" to Climategate, and that the global warming skeptics using the hacked emails as evidence for their cause need to brush up on their science. (more...)

Future former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post yesterday, in which she roundly dismissed the idea of cap-and-trade. The piece is generating quite a lot of discussion, including rebuttals from John Kerry and Sarah Palin From Several Months Ago. (more...)