By Brad Friedman on 12/4/2009, 2:55pm PT  

"Biased thermometers" are to blame for scientific data documenting a precipitous rise in global temperatures, according to Marc Morano.

Morano was Rush Limbaugh's former producer and a columnist at the rightwing "news" site, Cybercast News Service, before becoming denialist-extraordinaire Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)'s top aide on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works. In 2003, Inhofe described global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," a statement which he stills stands by today.

Morano now runs the climate denialist website ClimateDepot.com and is, essentially, the very heart of the entire climate change denialist echosphere.

On CNN on Thursday, he debated with James Balog, photographer and former "climate change skeptic" with a degree in geomorphology....

Balog has been documenting rapid changes to glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere via his Extreme Ice Survey project since 2006, which, according to Wikipedia, is "the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography...to illustrate the effects of global warming on the earth’s glacial ice."

EIS bas been capturing time-lapse photography over the last three years via cameras "at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia" and elsewhere, to be "used for scientific evidence and as part of a global outreach campaign aimed at educating the public about the effects of global warming." (Be sure to check out some of the cool hi-def EIS videos here.)

Here's the too-short debate between Morano and Balog, as hosted by CNN's Rick Sanchez, where Morano argues that the earth is actually cooling, despite scientific evidence --- based on "biased thermometers," as Morano argues, "placed near air conditioner outlets, near asphalt" --- showing this decade to be the warmest on record. We'll leave it to you to decide whose got their facts straight, the science photographer or Rush Limbaugh's former producer:

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