Earlier this week, AP science “reporter” Seth Borenstein wrote what should be a career-ending propaganda piece masquerading as a straight news story.

Obama left with little time to curb global warming

WASHINGTON (AP) – When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

That is only the intro, it gets worse from there. My friend Bruce McQuain at QandO took exception and highlighted some of Borenstein’s propaganda reporting, including this gem, that global cooling is proof of global warming,

“Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.”

Wha? Cool = warm? How does one take AP seriously?

Michael R. Fox, a retired nuclear scientist and chemistry professor from the University of Idaho makes a critical, under-appreciated point about how damaging it can be when activism replaces journalism, especially when it comes from the AP,

There’s very little that’s right about it. And it’s really harmful to the United States because people like this Borenstein working for AP have an enormous impact on everyone, because AP sells their news service to a thousand news outlets. One guy like him can be very destructive and alarming. Yeah it’s freedom of speech, but its dishonest.

Can I get an amen! A geology professor at the University of Oklahoma, David Deming, agrees that Borenstein’s piece is especially awful,

He says global warming is accelerating. Not only is it continuing, it’s accelerating, and whether it’s continuing that was completely beyond the evidence. The mean global temperature, at least as measured by satellite, is now the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years sea level has stopped rising. Hurricane and cyclone activity in the northern hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980….Reporters, as I understand reporters, are supposed to report facts. What he’s doing here is he’s writing a polemic and reporting it as fact, and that’s not right. It’s not reporting. It’s propaganda.

Another scientist, James O’Brien, an emeritus professor at Florida State University, a Global Warming supporter, goes on in the article to also slam the AP’s science fiction writer,

“Global climate change is occurring in many places in the world,” O’Brien said. “But everything that’s attributed to global warming, almost none of it is global warming.”

He took issue with the AP article’s assertion that melting Arctic ice will cause global sea levels to rise.

“When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it’s displacing water,” O’Brien said. “When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down.

“I call it a fourth grade science experiment. Take a glass, put some ice in it. Put water in it. Mark level where water is. Let it met. After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes Principle.”

He called sea level changes a “major scare tactic used by the global warming people.”

It sure is. Here is my interview with Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air has it exactly right,

Unfortunately, that’s been the history of the global-warming cult over the last decade. They accept no challenges, demonize those who question their science, scoff at contradictory data (such as the fact that temperatures have stopped rising), and insist on politicizing their science rather than work from facts. The AP has become the cult’s propaganda arm.

For more coverage of Global Warming Climate Change insanity, click here.