There once was a little known website fighting the so-called "global warming alarmism" being spread by that underground cabel of conspirators some of us call "scientists." But the site was no longer little after the Matt Drudge, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity right wing echo machine got through with it.

Since it's anointment, the Watt's Up With That blog run by former TV weatherman Anthony Watts has become quite the sensation amongst the climate denial blog comment trolls. And now it seems that the site is about to win the award for "Best Science Blog" in this year's Weblog Awards.

Has it seriously come to this? Are there really no blogs out there more worthy than one that spends its days trumpeting the likes of Junk Science as a reason we should ignore the dire warnings of climate scientists at the top science academies in the world?

There are lots of great science sites out there and there are some really good ones nominated along with Watt's Up With That. I would like to think that this is simply a case of voter apathy. After all, these types of Web Awards always come down to who can pull the most votes.

So I'm putting this appeal out there.

Take a few minutes today - the polls close at 5pm EST today, January 13th - and cast your vote by clicking here.

Here's some others that are in the running: The controversial crusader against Intelligent Design, PZ Myers is running a close second to Watts, so the strategic vote would obviously go to PZ. Also check out Real Climate run by practicing scientists at NASA.

With more than three years of writing on climate change issues and the climate denial industry, DeSmogBlog has amassed a lot of information - close to 1,300 articles in fact.

As part of the annual summer cleaning, I'm going through a lot of the old material for technical reasons, so I thought I would start a post listing some of our "golden oldies."

I'll add more as I come across them.

Do you have any favorites? Let me know and I'll add them to the list.

Former Imperial Oil scientist, Clement Bowman is one of the chemical engineers who helped unlock the commercial potential of Canada's oil sands and he's now saying that the Canadian government must urgently take the necessary steps to clean up the huge environmental impacts of the oil sands projects.

Unless they're solved, a number of us feel the oil sands have almost hit a wall," says Brown.

The tangled web of rhetoric and PR spin is being tightly wove as the Kansas coal plant fight continues.

Case in point, Earl Watkins Jr. is the President and CEO of Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, the company who recently lost its bid to build two new coal plants in Kansas and he's been making the rounds in the State Legislator trying to convince politicians that his company, "... has no fuel bias, meaning they're doing what provides the best fuel supply at the best price."

Watkin's "no fuel bias" is a little hard to believe when the same Earl Watkins Jr. sits on the Board of Directors of the Western Fuels Association, a cooperative business that supplies 17 million tons of coal to electric generating plants across the United States.

DeSmogBlog was referenced today in a New York Times article on the battle over coal power in the US.