It's no big secret that I think the Daily Mail is a vile excuse for a newspaper, whether it's stirring up false claims about the MMR vaccine, allegedly paying Polish immigrants to break the law, or distorting the truth to spread hysteria about crime. Today they've published two classic Mail stories - more of Richard Littejohn's nonsense about climate change, and a bunch of raunchy photos of 15 and 16 year-old girls.

I'll get the girls out of the way first. The story centers on the exploits of the Hudson family in Marbella, who allowed their daughter to advertise a house party for her 16th birthday on MySpace. Predictably, about about five million people turned up, and trashed the place.

How best to illustrate this article? They decided to publish a bunch of photos of the 15 and 16 year-old guests - only the scantily-clad, female ones of course, taken from various social networking sites, with captions like "Little devil: Jodie at another party lets her hair down" and "The teenagers bed down after a wild night in the £4.4million villa" (yes, they had a photo of the girls in bed). It's just a teensy bit hypocritical for a paper claiming to have moral standards.

Of course, we shouldn't be too surprised - this is the same paper that in 2001 featured photos of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who were 13 and 11 at the time respectively, in their bikinis next to a headline describing the recently broadcast Brass Eye special "Paedogeddon" (an explosive satire on media coverage of paedophiles) as "sick".

Anyway, on to global warming, and Littejohn's latest little rant:

"In all the acres of coverage of 'climate change', here's something you won't have read. Last week, Dr Arthur Robinson, of the University of Oregon, announced to a packed Washington Press Conference that 31,000 scientists had signed an online petition challenging the conventional wisdom that man-made C02 emissions were causing 'global warming'."

This went largely unreported on either side of the Atlantic. Any dissent from the great global warming scam, however valid, is dismissed as heresy."

Littlejohn is referring to the Oregon Petition The reason it hasn't been reported much isn't some kind of vast scientific conspiracy by "eco-loonies", it's for two very simple reasons: a) it's been around since 1999 so it's hardly "news", and b) it's a load of codswallop to begin with.

There are two lies in Littlejohn's article that would be very obvious if he'd actually done any, y'know, research. The petition doesn't challenge the suggestion that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, and neither has it been signed by 31,000 scientists. So, er, apart from those minor quibbles, spot on.

Tim Lambert provided a comprehensive debunking of this nonsense four years ago (making it all the more ridiculous that Littlejohn is still clinging to it now), but I'll give you the bare bones here:

• The petition actually challenges the view that there is evidence of catastrophic heating in the foreseeable future.
• It was sent out to people with a letter that seriously misrepresented not just the petition, but the organization behind it.
• A SciAm study taking a random sample of 30 signatories found that only a fraction of the signatories were really relevant - many no longer even agreed with the petition.
• The list is open to abuse, and full of fake names, duplicates, etc. As the Seattle Times amusingly noted: "It was touted as a collection of thousands of scientists debunking global warming. So was that Perry Mason on the list? And John Grisham? What about that Spice Girl? "

So predictably, a load of nonsense from Littlejohn, but it's better than his last column: "outside, it was chucking it down. But according to the BBC, the most important story in the whole wide world was 'global warming', so they wheeled on the Guardian's eco-loony George Monbiot ... For the sake of 'balance' they had on Tony Benn's boy, who buys into the whole 'climate change' garbage. "

Now that was just a rant filled with colourful ad-hominem attacks, but it exposes the source of Littlejohn's bewilderment. Because he hasn't bothered to do the most basic research into the "facts" he puts across to his audience, he doesn't understand why people aren't taking his fringe views seriously.

To the extremist, everybody is biased one way.