Meteoric Myron

As professional unwelcome guest and syndicated liar, Myron put forth his latest thesis on science earlier this month:

"Models are not scientific evidence," Myron said. "There is no way to prove a model. If something is a scientific fact, it means you can test it to find out whether it's true or false. There is no way to test these models -- to check if there a predicted effect will happen in the future."

So, to put this into perspective, if our astronomic telescopes spotted an incoming meteor whose trajectory was on a collision course with planet Earth (according to our best computer simulations), this would not be a scientific fact. Only the meteoric impact itself would be real -- anything else is pure speculation.

While we may concede that Myron Ebell may know his politics and neo-liberal economics, he is a genuine scientific illiterate. What we have here is a clash of realities. Scientists know that Physics ultimately underpins everything, while the economists believe that everything is for sale, including all scientific results.

However, Science is about the laws of thermodynamics, the Gravitational constant, and the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Scientific predictions are justifiable calculations determined by those laws. Scientific evidence is a fair comparison between those types of predictions and past measurements. This is exactly what those ancient ice cores which record the climate over the past hundred thousand years are extracted for. That is what we test the models against.

As Exxon lobbyist, Myron Ebell's job is to destroy any perceived threat to his employer for money. That threat is now the Kyoto Protocol and the public understanding that would follow from it. I have no doubt that Myron and his group of Economic Hit Men can, with their skilled political manoeuvring and tactical lies, destroy and bury it. They have stated many times that this is their intent.

Myron will destroy the Kyoto Protocol, he can deny the existence of an oncoming meteor, and he would stab the eyes of anyone who saw that which displeased him with a rusty nail so that they may no longer report it. But this does not change reality. The future will strike. And we will have Myron and the people in the mass media who were willing to publish his excrement to thank for our next few years of criminal ignorance.

The end is nigh is a Broadway musical

Myron has been at it again, serving up garbage at a UN climate change conference. You'd think that once the United States had withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol they'd have the decency to bugger off. However, there's money to be made wrecking the world.

The Exxon funded climate lobbyists are feeding people a raft of contradicting lies. Not only is climate change not happening, Myron Ebell says, it will be a good thing when it does because all those Canadians will be able to move away from the US border and more into their own country. But they'll have to take their rifles with them, to reclaim their land back from the polar bear population explosion.

Meanwhile, the dishonest scientist and one time dinner guest at the CEI, Bjorn Lomborg, is giving a different line at the same conference. He says that human induced climate change is huge and inevitable, and such a big long-term problem we should leave it to our grandchildren to sort out. Instead, we should enjoy our SUVs while we've got them, and pretend to solve the AIDs pandemic. We rich people have nothing to fear. We can move up into the mountains and sort it out by letting everyone else die.

Very nice. Move along now. These men are professional liars. They are just actors on a stage playing the show: "Exxon saves the world". Nothing they say is true. It's now time throw rotten tomatoes and to boo them off the stage.

Blow me down with a windmill

The Myron Ebell Climate prepares you for the misinformation floating in the pipeline. A professor in Calgary University's Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, David Keith, published a paper, sponsored by BP and the Ford Foundation, about how the use of wind turbines could change the climate by slowing down the Earth's air flow.

This news came to me in an interview on NPR (National Petroleum Radio), where he outlines his case.

To be fair, he does say that -- compared to climate change caused by burning fossil fuels -- this effect may be negligible or possibly beneficial since it merely alters the distribution of energy in the atmosphere. But this is not the message Myron Ebell is going to blab when he wakes up from his Bush re-election post-party coma. You can tell it's a bum cherry he can't resist. Even better, since trees produce good deal more drag on the wind than any sleek white windmill, it's a good excuse for cutting down forests.

Carbon sequestration by planting wood is not the answer. Interestingly, Professor Keith is in the business of Geologic Storage of CO2 which the oil companies are pretty much in favour of now. The idea is to get the government to pay them to pump gas into their old and depleted oil reservoirs and help squirt out the last remaining drops of the black stuff as a profitable byproduct. A win-win situation, if there ever was one, because it's a technical fix: governments and what passes for public opinion are easily taken for a ride by a solution that involves no change whatsoever to anyone's present lifestyle. Even if that lifestyle involves being subject to bombing raids because they happen to live in a country that has oil in the ground.

No matter how flawed the ideas are, you can bet your bottom dollar that Professor Keith, Myron Ebell, and the cronies of the scientific establishment with their comfortable jobs, grant proposals, and prestigious petro-publications are going to come out and speak the truth. The truth is not worth anything to these guys, when measured in dollars. The utter shame and catastrophic failure of our elite intelligensia to prepare us for the fact that our way of life is not sustainable, will not be sustained, and has got to change, will be the curse of later generations for as long as the record of their present folly is preserved.