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U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee and contends that manmade global warming is a "hoax," stepped up his attack on prominent climate-change reporting in a pair of recent speeches on the Senate floor.

Inhofe's addresses echoed and expanded upon the critique of climate journalism that he and a new press aide (who formerly worked for conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh) launched during the summer via press release and interview. Those earlier broadsides targeted the Associated Press and its reporter Seth Borenstein, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw for a Discovery Channel report, and New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin (see related July 2006 article).

In the first of Inhofe's two speeches, delivered on Sept. 25, (see Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works website) he repeated those earlier charges and added criticism of CBS (and "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley), Time, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times (for running an op-ed piece by a university professor) and The New York Times (for a piece by staff columnist Bob Herbert).

In general, Inhofe said in that speech, global warming is "the most media-hyped environmental issue of all time," and he accused "the media and entertainment industry" of "an unprecedented parade of environmental alarmism" over the issue.

A Google News search revealed little immediate attention to the address by major media outlets.

One notable exception was a front page story about the speech on Sept. 26 in the Tulsa World. It was displayed beside an AP article reporting that a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had found that "Earth's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, a warming that has begun to affect plants and animals." (See a pdf of the front page at http://www.tulsaworld.com/TWPDFs/2006/Final/W_092606_A_1.PDF.)

In addition, the online magazine Grist, which has an avowedly environmentalist perspective, posted a blog item on Sept. 25 that offered rebuttals of a number of the Inhofe speech's key assertions about climate science, which it labeled "right-wing global warming myths."

On the morning of Sept. 28, CNN offered a report on Inhofe's speech that was dominated by its own rebuttals of the senator's claims about climate science. Correspondent Miles O'Brien said that "when we asked for an interview with (Inhofe) we were told he's just too busy to speak with us this week."

Inhofe did find time for an interview about his Senate speech that was broadcast that evening on the CNN Headline News channel show hosted by conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Beck introduced the segment with a monologue, saying he thinks human-caused global warming is "nothing more than a planet-wide pyramid scheme."

Also on Sept. 28 – after the O'Brien story was first broadcast and before the Beck program – Inhofe delivered another Senate speech focusing on climate reporting. In it, he criticized the O'Brien report as "a failed attempt to refute me," and added that he hoped "everyone will watch" the Beck interview. Also, he critiqued a climate report on ABC's "Good Morning America" program, which aired on Sept. 26, and the reporter, Bill Blakemore.

On Sept. 30, Inhofe was interviewed on Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends Weekend" program (see http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Video_Environment_Cmte_Chair_says_global_0930.html), reiterating some of the points he had made on the Senate floor, again criticizing the O'Brien piece on CNN, and telling the Fox show's host that Fox is "just really the exception" to other media outlets' distortion of the global warming issue.

In both his Sept. 25 and Sept. 28 speeches, Inhofe suggested that "alarmist" news reports are actually increasing public skepticism about human influence on climate. He left unexplained why he is denouncing such reports, when he thinks they cause more people to embrace his view that global warming is due to natural causes.

Inhofe went face-to-face with CNN's Miles O'Brien in an 8:30 a.m. (ET) October 3 segment on CNN in which the senator defended his criticisms of media climate coverage, including that by O'Brien, and claimed that climate science supports his position that humans are not the cause of a warming climate. O'Brien countered by pointing to several scientific studies contesting that viewpoint, and Inhofe countered with claims of science on his side.

Neither Inhofe nor O'Brien appeared convinced by the other's claims, and the public was perhaps left little better informed on the human causes behind climate change.