Here's Peter Sinclair's Global Warming Crock of the Week:

In the video Peter goes over some of the fundamental discoveries, the basic facts that we know beyond a doubt, about global warming. Of course, many people will never believe science, because they believe that anything that challenges their world view is all part of a secret, vast global conspiracy.

Case in point is Senator James Inhofe, perhaps at once the most dangerous and the most clueless man on the planet, who gave an interview to Grist. Here's his hoax theory:

Q. You reasserted in today’s hearing your belief that global warming is a hoax. Can you clarify specifically who is perpetrating the hoax? Who are the dupers and who are the victims of the climate hoax?

A. Who are the victims? It would be the United States. It would be the economy, what would happen to this country according to MIT and others who have made analyses as to the economic destruction that would come with something like cap-and-trade or [regulating greenhouse-gas emissions] through the Clean Air Act.

Q. Who are the perpetrators of the hoax?

A. That’s the United Nations and the IPCC, clearly.

Q. Major energy companies have said they believe the scientific consensus on climate change. ExxonMobil said the appropriate debate isn’t on whether the climate is changing, but what we should do about it. NASA, NOAA, the Pentagon, the Pope, evangelical leaders, top executives in all industries, and governments all over the world including China and India—they’ve all acknowledged climate change. Do you believe that all of these entities have been scammed by the U.N. and a handful of scientists in the IPCC?

A. What you’ve just said is not true. There’s not unanimity at all even though you want to believe it.

NOAA and NASA and all these organizations, these people are all tied in to the IPCC. There are a lot of companies, oil companies and all that, who would like to have cap-and-trade. That’s where they can make money.

Q. What do you believe is the motive of the U.N.? What is the motive of the scientists who are perpetrating the hoax? How do you think they stand to benefit?

A. They stand to benefit [from] government grants and private sector grants [from places] like the Heinz Foundation.

We have scientists who are really sincere, and they’ve watched what’s going on and they have a hard time believing it. Those are the ones who started going to me probably seven or eight years ago, saying they’re cooking the science on this, someone’s got to say it, and I said it. And then more of them came. I listed them on my website. I’ve been very clear all along who the perpetrators were, what the motives were.

Q. So you believe that the U.N. and the scientists on the IPCC are perpetrating the hoax in order to get grant money?

A. No, no, no. We’ve already covered this, Amanda. You guys always ask the same question over and over again looking for a different answer. What is it you want that I didn’t already tell you?

Q. I’m trying to clarify the motivation behind the hoax. Why would these scientists want to deceive the global public?

A. It’s very clear that when you have the U.N. behind it, and you have all the Hollywood people moving in, you have the Heinz Foundation, that’s John Kerry’s wife—a lot of very wealthy people.

Many of [the scientists] know that if they were recipients of grants in the past, that could well be cut off. Or if they haven’t had them, they would want them. The complaints I had brought to me were from scientists who said that many scientists had been intimidated into saying things that weren’t true because of that leverage that has been used.

Q. So you believe the scientists and the U.N. are in it for the money?

A. Well, that enters into it, yes.

That's right the Senator from Oklahoma thinks that scientists and the UN are pushing global warming for the money. It's a vast conspiracy spanning decades and scientists from multiple disciplines across the globe. The lunacy of that proposition speaks for itself. It is evidently clear that basic science is beyond the Senator.

The other major development is a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times by former Vice President Al Gore responding to the skeptics and again issuing a call to action.

Here's the core of his argument:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The full op-ed is worth read. The Inhofe interview is only if you want a laugh.