CEI blogs away

Like the Myron Ebell Climate, Myron Ebell and the rest of the CEI fruitloops run a blog. It's aptly illustrated with an empty shopping trolley representing the state of their conscience.

Myron doesn't contribute to it much, but his glee at the lack of action on the problem by the newly elected Democrats in the US Congress is quite stomach turning.

There will be two (two!) subcommittees with jurisdiction over global warming, one chaired by Senator Boxer herself and the other by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. She said that the committee won’t mark-up global warming legislation any time soon, but instead will conduct a "very long process of extensive hearings."

In a previous post, Myron smeared James Hansen saying that he acts like a Stalinist, based on a statement he made about climate change deniers: "Some of this noise won't stop until some of these scientists are dead". This is true, some people have a mental block. Myron will do his utmost to ensure that such defective thinkers are given the coverage they don't deserve.

I can't find the exact background to Myron's other allegation:

It is also worth noting how far out of the mainstream are Dr. Hansen’s own opinions. He recently speculated that sea levels could rise twenty feet per century for the next four centuries. The Third Assessment Report of the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing the consensus of scientists with expertise in the field, estimates that continued global warming could cause sea levels to rise up to twenty inches in the next century.

He doesn't give a link, presumably to make it not completely trivial to verify that he is as usual lying, but it sounds like he has perpetrated a misreading of this:

Hansen reminds us that coming out of the last ice age the sea rose 5 metres per century for four centuries at one stage.

Recall that whenever Myron refers to IPCC statements, it's from the 2001 document, which is now seen as a considerable underestimate of the severity of the problem.

Marlo Lewis junior Fellow

For some light relief, try watching these three videos from the CEI featuring the usual two jokes about the benefits of plant growth and economic growth:

[C]arbon dioxide is plant food. It’s a form of fertilizer. Literally hundreds of scientific observations show that plants raised in carbon dioxide-enriched environments grow faster, larger, and produce more fruit. They’re also more resistant to air pollution—the real stuff.

Most of the people watching [An Inconvenient Truth] would not even exist without the fantastic increases in global productivity and wealth made possible by fossil fuels.

I don't know how much longer we have to put up with this horseshit. He could be referring to someone calling himself a scientist walking in and out of a greenhouse literally hundreds of times in a day, but the official scientific conclusions from the US government say:

The impacts of climate change on crops and vegetation depend oncomplex interactions among increased CO2, rising temperatures, and water and nutrient availability. Elevated levels of CO2 can essentially fertilize plants and crops. However, plant growth is also affected by other factors in addition to CO2— factors that will be influenced by climate change. Modest temperature increases, for example, can enhance growth, but if temperatures increase too much, growth actually declines. Rising temperatures also increase the process by which plants release CO2. Higher temperatures can increase the rate of evaporation, drying out soils. Insufficient water decreases plant growth. Plants also cannot respond to more CO2 unless sufficient nutrients are available. Furthermore, the growth-enhancing effects of CO2 may diminish over time. Real-world crop yields would also be subject to the hazards of droughts and floods under a changing climate.

And that's just the climate. The claim doesn't even ride for the level of one plant, because the CO2 stimulates non-mycorrhizal plants which take up the nutrients.

Lewis then adds a funny morsel thrown to the Blame The Blame America First crowd:

We lead the world in technological advancement, medical innovation, and agricultural research and output. In other words, U.S. military-industrial complex industries help feed people, heal people, and kill fulfill people. This requires energy. Our use of energy enables people all over the world to live better lives.

Of course, let's not forget the best bit:

What this implies is that even if CO2 emissions are responsible for all the warming of the past 30 years—a big if—we may reasonably expect about 1.7 degrees Celsius of warming over the next hundred years.

Should we be alarmed about that? No. People experience far more dramatic climate change when they retire and move from Albany to Miami, or Chicago to Phoenix.