This is old in internet-time, but it is too funny to skip.

Last week, someone (the author is anonymous, but the site was owned by David Thorpe) created a fake scientific journal, the "Journal of Geoclimatic Studies." The lead paper was "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?" Reading the article, it is obviously a spoof. The equations are random latin and greek letters, the units don't make sense, several figures are pure sine waves, and the writing style sounds like an opinion piece instead of a scientific paper. There are a couple good posts about this on one of Nature's blogs: fake climate change paper and author of spoof paper speaks.

The best part is how many people thought it was real. Many bad-science bloggers fell for it. The best part is that Rush Limbaugh apparently spent a good bit of time talking about it on Thursday.

The spin by people who fell for it is great. One representative quote that has popped up in several places:

The global warming hoax is getting sophisticated enough to spawn subhoaxes intended to discredit the resistance. . . . Slick enough to temporarily trick even Rush Limbaugh, it claimed that global warming is caused by ocean bacteria. --moonbattery.com

Many of the posters quickly found their mistake:

I, along with a number of other bloggers, and even Rush Limbaugh, apparently, fell for what has turned out to be a complete hoax. A made up abstract published at the website of a fake science journal purports to explain global warming by monitoring bacteria emissions. As I stated in the post, I can't claim to understand the research which formed the basis of the argument in the paper, which is now obvious as it was totally made up. --peerreviewflorida.com

They could have at least checked the source and looked up some of the terms before posting. This is a good reminder to evaluate evidence before making a conclusion instead of afterwards. Not that many of the people who believed the paper care about evidence. I wonder how long it will be until I hear someone that didn't get the message that this was a spoof.