Global warming skepticism knows no (planetary) bounds. The big scientific news of the week was the discovery of methane plumes rising from Mars’ surface. Because methane release on Earth is commonly associated with microbial digestion, NASA researchers believe the greenhouse gas could be a sign of life.

In a new paper published in the journal Science, Michael Mumma, the project’s lead scientist, hypothesizes that bacteria buried one to two miles below the red planet’s surface could be producing the plumes. The other possibility is that the gas is being generated by vulcanism or another geologic process – though that seems less likely since there has been no evidence of active volcanoes. This uncertainty, on top of recent warming trends, has led some to speculate that solar activity may be responsible for Martian climate change.

He may only be part of a noisy minority, but Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) isn’t about to let his fringe status get in the way of his latest skeptic shtick.

As he did last year, Inhofe, writing under the guise of the Minority on the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, has penned another anti-global warming screed with the help of his staffer, Marc Morano, entitled “UN Blowback: More than 650 International Scientists Dissent over Man-Made Global Warming Claims”. And, like last year, Inhofe’s laughable attempt at a serious “report” falls flat on its face upon any close scrutiny.

While there is much that could be singled out for ridicule in the senator’s report, I’ll focus on what I’ll call the skeptics’ “greatest hits” (i.e. the wrong-headed arguments they’ve been trotting out for months, if not years, to “prove” their point).

Let’s start with the claim made in the report’s title: that “half of warming” is due to solar forcing.

Despite being debunked over and over again, skeptics like Inhofe have latched onto a few studies published during the last decade that purported to show a link between solar activity – cosmic rays, in particular – and rising greenhouse gas emissions. (The idea being that cosmic rays helped water droplets form in the atmosphere, leading to increased cloud clover and, thus, lower average temperatures.)

In an alternate universe, where up is down, planets are flat, and hot is actually cold, lives a certain Republican Senator named James Inhofe. He has been known to travel to the US Senate and hold climate change hearings in which science fiction is introduced as "evidence" that climate change is a "hoax", and in which individuals with questionable scientific judgment are called upon to profess their agreement with his views.

One tired argument that he and his oily friends have consistently brought up is that global warming is cyclical, and is caused by sunspots. Regardless of the fact that the "sunspots and cosmic rays" theory of global warming has been conclusively disproved (multiple times), Inhofe brought it up in today's Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meeting, citing the Farmer's Almanac as his "research" source.

I hadn't seen this paper before, but it sets out clearly the (self-?) deception necessary to believe that the sun produced the current round of global warming.

In fact, the "almost perfect" corelation between solar activity and temperature that the National Post reported last week was based on faulty data - and has since been dismissed in any case.