This morning on CNN Senator James Inhofe continued his tirade against the media, making accusations of fear-mongering and claiming global warming to be “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

CNN anchor Miles O’Brien politely attempted to refute Inhofe’s pseudo-scientific claims; but he failed miserably in not pointing out that between 1989 and 2006 the good Senator from Oklahoma received $850,123 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, by far the single greatest contributor to Inhofe’s political career during a period spanning almost 20 years. The only hoax, it seems, is Inhofe himself.

Anytime I see a talking head on television spouting out against network neutrality or calling global warming a hoax, I can be 99.9% sure the individual has been hired or financed by some cover group that, when all the accounting has been sorted out, represents a big industry with big money on the line. Sadly, the most venal of them all are our public representatives.

Senator Inhofe’s assertion that “science is on his side” is smashed to pieces by the folks at realclimate.org, who break the Senator’s argument down into three claims refuted by the latest and greatest in climate science.

Let’s get the facts straight folks. As Rick Piltz, former senior associate at the Climate Change Science Program, said over a year ago on Radio Open Source, “what we know about the climate comes from more than 2000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the UN in what is the largest and most rigorously peer reviewed scientific collaboration in history.”

If we, as a society and a civilization, are going to put any faith in the scientific community to effectively and accurately describe a single phenomenon in nature, then this, ladies and gentlemen, is it.

Piltz spells out clearly and factually the gravity of the climate change situation:

The urgency is that our climate is changing very very rapidly. Scientists are concerned that a lot of these impacts will begin to have runaway effects that will no longer be reversible. Basically we have heated the deep oceans; we have reversed the carbon cycle by 400,000 years; we have loosed a wave of violent weather; we have altered the timing of the seasons; glaciers around the world are melting away; insect populations are exploding; they’re spreading malaria and dengue and yellow fever around the world to populations that have never before experienced it; agriculture is getting in trouble. We really are on the cusp of some very very serious disruptions.

The media, believing that they must cover both sides of an issue, has backed itself into a very uncomfortable corner, forcing itself to provide a stage for muppets like Inhofe, who speak out of self interest to muddy the waters around an issue which has been unanimously accepted as fact within the scientific community.

The real debate is taking place in the blogosphere and elsewhere on the Internet. This debate doesn’t center around whether global warming is real or not, nor does it trivialize the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence pointing its finger squarely in the face of an anthropogenic warming source. The problem is real. What we’re trying to figure out, is how to confront it.