On the July 31 broadcast of his Newsradio 850 KOA show, Mike Rosen named several sources of what he called “good, solid, hard rebuttals” of the scientific consensus that human activity is largely responsible for a rise in global temperatures in recent decades. However, Rosen did not mention that a variety of critics have called each of his sources -- Christopher Horner, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Crichton, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, and Richard Lindzen -- into question either on the merits of their work or because of the source's financial connections to the oil industry. Examples include:

• The Politically Incorrect Guide^TM to Global Warming and Environmentalism (Regnery, February 2007) by Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) senior fellow Christopher Horner. As Colorado Media Matters has noted (here and here), CEI has received extensive funding from the energy industry and has engaged in overt acts of distortion in attempting to debunk climate change science.

• The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001) by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. As Colorado Media Matters has pointed out, Lomborg has been discredited by respected climate experts, and in January 2002 Scientific American published a series of articles from four well-known environmental specialists who lambasted The Skeptical Environmentalist for “egregious distortions,” “elementary blunders of quantitative manipulation and presentation that no self-respecting statistician ought to commit,” and sections that were “poorly researched and ... rife with careless mistakes.” A backgrounder by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) similarly reported that Lomborg's findings and methodology “fail[] to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis.”

• State of Fear (HarperCollins, 2004) by novelist Michael Crichton. NASA scientist James Hansen indicated that Crichton, in a footnote to his novel, misrepresented Hansen's research and said of Crichton, “He doesn't seem to have the foggiest notion about the science that he writes about.” The climate science blog RealClimate has published a more extensive debunking of Crichton's claims.

• George C. Marshall Institute. As Colorado Media Matters has noted, Congressional Quarterly on March 19, 2004, described this organization as “a Washington-based think tank supported by industry and conservative foundations that focuses primarily on trying to debunk global warming as a threat.” In a January 3 report (“Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to 'Manufacture Uncertainty' on Climate Science”), the UCS identified the George C. Marshall Institute as an Exxon Mobil-financed “clearinghouse for global warming contrarians.” Moreover, the George C. Marshall Institute's chief executive officer, William O'Keefe, is the former executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Petroleum Institute, which is the main U.S. trade organization for the oil and natural gas industry.

• Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute received $115,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2006. According to the UCS, between 1998 and 2005 Heartland received $561,500, including $119,000 in 2005 alone. Heartland also maintains a separate “Global Warming Facts” Web page that promotes books by and offers links to the works of Exxon Mobil-funded skeptics.

• Richard Lindzen. The UCS identified Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as among the scientific spokespeople affiliated at one time with such Exxon Mobil-funded organizations as The Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, the Cato Institute, and the George C. Marshall Institute.

Rosen listed the sources as a guide to a caller who had asked for resources “in which the facts versus the, quote, consensus are ... paired together.”

From the July 31 broadcast of Newsradio 850 KOA's The Mike Rosen Show:

CALLER: What I'm wondering is, I mean, we, we all know what, what, what the deal is with this global warming, but do you know of, of any website resource -- or any other resource, really -- in which the -- in which the facts versus the, quote, consensus are, you know, paired together?

ROSEN: Yes. Yes, there's a wealth of that kind of stuff. You got a pencil and paper?

CALLER: Absolutely. Shoot.

ROSEN: OK. First of all, just go to, go to my webpage. Go to 850koa.com, click on shows, then click on The Mike Rosen Show.

CALLER: OK.

ROSEN: You'll see several links on my home page, including a fabulous slide show.

CALLER: Mm-hmm.

ROSEN: Then I'd get Christopher Horner's book called The Politically Incorrect, Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. We had Chris on the program recently.

CALLER: Uh-huh. I heard that.

ROSEN: You might read Bjorn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist. He's a, a Scandinavian economist who's done a lot of work in this area. Read a great novel -- Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear, which puts this in very digestible terms. I think you'll enjoy the book, and Michael Crichton is a great novelist, but he's done a great deal of homework and has carefully documented a lot of the stuff that he presents in this. Then there's the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. Their website is Marshall -- that's M-a-r-s-h-a-l-l.org. They've got some really good stuff in this area. And then there's the Heartland Institute. Their website is Heartland.org. That will be a good start for you.

CALLER: OK.

ROSEN: Also, if you just want to check it out on your own, just Google “climate change,” “global warming,” and you can pass on all of, all of the, the global warming bandwagon sites and go to some of the ones that offer the other side.

CALLER: Sure, sure. When I did, when I did the Google search, the first thing I came up was this “The Global Warming Hoax,” which seemed credible at first glance, but it just, deeper into it, it just was really a lot of cavalier talk from the skeptic angle but that didn't really --

ROSEN: Well, the sources, the sources I gave you provide good, solid, hard rebuttals --

CALLER: Yeah.

ROSEN: -- that are documented. Also, do a, do a browse on Richard Lindzen. L-i-n-d-z-e-n. Richard Lindzen. He's a meteorology professor at MIT who's just brilliant in this area, and he's one of the most prominent skeptics of global warming alarmism.