Wall Street Journal Catches DCI Group Dirty PR Bomb. Get Your Science On with Weather Channel Instead.

If you're one of those 59,000 youtube users who downloaded Al Gore's Penguin Army, a spoof lampooning An Inconvenient Truth, well - caveat emptor, baby.

According to today's Wall Street Journal, the video may have been a dirty pr bomb produced by DCI Group.

DCI Group is a Washington D.C. public relations firm that represents ExxonMobil - the Mel Gibson of oil companies that underwrites junk science and cynical pr efforts designed to muddle the global warming debate and stall critical decisions while they continue to rake in record profits.

ExxonMobil denies any involvement with the Penguin Army vid.

A DCI spokesman "declined to say whether or not" DCI Group produced the vid, according to the WSJ.

The so-called vid creator goes by the name of "Toutsmith" and claims to be a 29 year old living in Beverly Hills. But when the WSJ traced email sent from Toutsmith's Yahoo account, the publication found "numerical data encoded [that] indicated it didn't come from an amateur working in his basement" and tracked the email back to a computer registered to DCI Group

According to the WSJ, DCI works to "raise doubts about the science of global warming" through Tech Central Station , an opinion website it operates. DCI also places fringe "scientists" on talk-radio and pays them to write editorials.

Traffic was driven to the Penguin Army youtube video in part by sponsored Google links which popped up when users googled search phrases like "Al Gore" or "Global Warming." The ads did not disclose who paid for the sponsored links but the links disappeared shorty after the WSJ contacted DCI on Tuesday.

Which brings me to my second point: alternatives to Exxon/DCI Group propaganda and manipulations.

Watch the Weather Channel's new series The Climate Code with Dr. Heidi Cullen. When the show launches in October, it will be television's only weekly series dedicated to the subject. The network will also debut a broadband channel called One Degree, named after the one degree rise in ocean temperatures over the last century.

"The purpose," said Weather Channel President Debora Wilson speaking to television critics during the net's TCA presentation on July 11, "is to bring a greater understanding of climate change, and the affects of climate change on our Earth, to people here in the U.S."

Weather Channel General Manager and Executive VP Wonya Lucas stressed that the series would be "deeply rooted in science. It's meant to help people understand the information. It's not an alarmist viewpoint. It's a scientific viewpoint. It comes from very scientific place for our consumers."

True to their word, the channel introduced pedigreed experts, panelists Dr. James Hansen, NASA's foremost climate expert from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and Andrew Revkin, the NY Times science writer and author who has covered climate change issues since 1988.

Said Revkin, "Science is a body of understanding. It's very robust but it's all in the boring middle. The stuff we really profoundly understand is [in the middle] but the voices we in the media love are the loudest ones at the edges of the debate. One of the neat things about what Heidi is trying to do with the show is that - by having a sustained focus - then you can get away from the 'he said, she said' approach and...just convey what is well understood and what is less well understood."

Said Hensen, "We're reaching a point where things are more obvious - warmer than normal seasons,a second hundred year flood in three years [on the east coast].....if we don't begin to take serious actions to reduce the growth rate of carbon dioxide especially, within the the next several years, then we're going to pass beyond the tipping point, which means that the dynamics of the system begin to take over and it's out of our control."

so... ignore the WMD's (Wicked Media Deceptions) coming out of the DCI shop and go get your science on at Weather Channel instead.