It’s much harder these days to pull off a good hoax. Eleven years ago, physicist Alan Sokal was able to fool the postmodernists with his spoof article on the “transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.” But a new fake study on global warming this week only took in a few gullible readers before the power of Google ended its run.

The article, “Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?” was supposedly published in the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies and was written by Daniel Klein of the department of climatology at Arizona State University, and colleagues at the department of atmospheric physics at Goteborgs Universitet. It blamed recent global warming on benthic bacteria—the bugs that live at the bottom of the ocean—rather than human pollution. Some people sympathetic to the notion fell for it, like Neil Craig.

Trouble is, Daniel Klein and his colleagues, their departments, and the journal do not exist—a fact that bloggers quickly picked up on. Roger Pielke Jr. posted a warning yesterday and John Fleck reports that the website for the journal is brand new. Desmogblog.com says that several sites, including Reason Magazine, posted reports on the fake paper and then pulled them.