Umm, I think that's ARPANET, not Arbinet (visions of hamburgers floating through Cyberspace....)

And "photable tags"...that would be "photovoltaic," as in "solar photovoltaic arrays"?

Aside from the pertinancy of the article, this look at the Congressional transcripting process is pretty hilarious.

Senator Monkey, R-Okla, screams nonsense while holding both hands over his ears. Yep, that would be difficult to transcript.

This is like something off of Saturday-Nite Live, only it's not, so it's just sad and pathetic.

Perhaps we should just staple his lips shut for a while.

Quoting Inhofe, just shows the pettiness of some of these people. Isn't it proper to address Mr. Gore as "Vice President" despite what you think about his positions? And especially in a public forum like a Senate hearing.

Loved it when Boxer smacked him down a notch.

In my lifetime. Every elephant, rhino, polar bear and whale. Every tiger, every lion, every manatee.

Also every shark, most large hawks, in fact most of the predators at or near the top will wink out in my lifetime. I just wanted you to understand that. Inhofe's grandchildren will be able to read about them in books or see stuffed ones in museums. But other than that, they're all dead but they don't know it yet. If Inhofe wants to deny that, and Limbaugh, who now devotes about 80% of his show to screaming about the fake liberal commie terrorist lesbian Christmas hating science that is Global Warming, that's fine. Just so you know though, all that wildlife will still be dead. In fact we should erect a monument right now to them who help extinguish the large animals. They're proud of it, so let's make it formal.

...we're going to have to do something about overpopulation. Hell, if we started fixing that, global warming and a lot of other things would take care of themselves. Issues like biodiviersity, land use, clean water, global epidemics, and sustainable agriculture would be so much simpler if we got our numbers back down to a reasonable level.

Good luck with that.

I'm sorry, where are the tough questions?

I see Mayor Inhofe trying struggling to understand the difference between average temperatures for the entire globe and the temperature in one town. Apparently, he thinks "Buffalo" and "Oklahoma" are planets. He also seems to be horribly confused by what we call "days" and what we call "years."

Warmest WINTER for earth on record? This one. Doesn't mean that it was warm in Siberia. It means that average temperatures across the planet (which is like...four or five times bigger than Buffalo, I'd bet) for the ENTIRE winter were warmer THIS year than for years where we've done the same thing in the past.

It has NOTHING to do with local temperatures. Perhaps Mayor Inhofe would like Vice-President Gore to speak slower. Or maybe he just didn't get a lolipop and he was throwing a tantrum.

My word. Inhofe is certainly playing to his oil-industry constituents there.

Can we tar and feather this dickwad when the arctic ice-cap finally melts? I'd suggest a stronger set of consequences for Inhofe, but that would be hateful, now wouldn't it?

God, the man is unspeakable. Says a lot for the good folks in Oklahoma that they send a neanderthal like this to Congress. You can have him, folks.

Hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. Inhofe complains about Gore wasting his 15 minutes, when really a large part of it was his arguing with Gore *about* his time. Amazing that people like that are in government. Props to Boxer for stopping his posturing.

It's not the "good folks in Oklahoma" who sent this partisan hack to Washington. We good folks are outnumbered by the "hopelessly ignorant folks in Oklahoma."

This is a guy who has run family businesses into the ground, been sued by relatives, refused to pay judgments when he lost the suits, yet still got elected to the United States Senate.

I never voted for him. But I sure am embarrassed by him.

Yes, I'm amazed that Inhofe fails to grasp the difference between local data points (be they temporal or physical) and global trends. I'm also shocked that Gore let him get away with this logical flaw, and instead responded with his own rant about scientific consensus. A much more relevant rebuttal, in addition to reminding the Senator about the average temperature being warmer than normal, is that an increase in GLOBAL average temperature is in fact predicted to bring about a more extreme range of LOCAL weather patters. More storms, of greater severity. More tornadoes, more blizzards, and greater local temperature fluctuations as the jet stream and ocean currents change. This does mean, surprise, surprise, extreme cold in some areas as well as extreme heat in others.

Tangentially:

"BOXER: No, that isn't the rule. You're not making the rules. You used to when you did this. You don't do this anymore. "

That is one of the greatest things I have ever read. Senator Boxer has long been one of my heroes pretty much because she's willing to say things like that.

As a resident of WNY, I feel compelled to point out that Buffalo had one of the warmest winters (December, January, and February) in its history as well. Poor city, they get one freak late October very wet snowstorm (snow that was melted in a matter of days) and suddenly, it's Siberia again.

I don't know how men like Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh, men who have access to all the information in the world, upon whom millions rely to synthesize that information, can simply reject the facts and keep the planet on a collision course with disaster. They must know, in their hearts, that they are misrepresenting the scientific consensus. So are they simply sociopathic? How could they behave the way they do, if they were not?

And what about the harsh reality these global-warming deniers surely know they will have face when disaster comes to pass? Do they simply reason that they will be too old to have to answer for their past actions? Are they simply readying a claim of unpredicability to go with their admission of being wrong?

I know about our free-speech protections. I know the value of an adversarial dialetic to determine truth. But, at the same time, it seems there should be consequences for knowingly promulgating falsehoods with such dire consequences. Like the cigarette executives who knowing mislead the public about the deathly consequences of smoking, shouldn't there be criminal penalties for falsifying facts about planetary demise? Isn't doing so a commission of fraud, or even treason, since it risks the livelihood of so many Americans and the American economy?