HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Roy Spencer, a climate researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has fired back at the Anti-Defamation League and questioned whether the organization is hypocritical.

The ADL criticized Spencer in a statement Tuesday for his description for those who believe humans are the foremost cause of global warming as "global warming Nazis."

Spencer told AL.com on Wednesday that his description is a response to his being called a global warming "denier" - which he equated with being a denier of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II.

"When people stop calling me a denier, which implies I'm as evil as a Holocaust denier, I will stop calling them global warming Nazis," Spencer told AL.com on Wednesday.

Spencer also used his blog for a sharply-worded response to the ADL in his personal blog.

Under the headline "Hypocrisy at the Anti-Defamation League?" Spencer wrote that the "ADL would appear to have decided (based upon their years of silence) that using Holocaust imagery is OK on one side of the global warming issue, but not the other."

Spencer cited in his blog a comment from syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe on Feb. 9, 2007:

In directing his comments to the ADL's Shelley Rose, who gave the statement criticizing Spencer, Spencer said that the ADL should be equally condemning of the common use of "denier" - a description President Obama has used -- when it comes to climate change.

"We didn't start the fire, Ms. Rose," Spencer wrote in his blog. "And your organization could have helped stop it."

Click here to read the full blog.