The comedy guide to human extinction

Not much has been showing up on the Myron Ebell hotline of late. We can but hope that he has lost his job and moved his family into a trailer park in Alabama to exercise his credentials in free enterprise action by picking up trash and getting drunk on battery acid. While it's momentarily pleasing to imagine that justice could be done, it's not really satisfactory. For the necessity of a full and comprehensive public repudiation from Exxon for all the lies he has said over the years on their behalf, the consequence of Ebell getting pensioned off to a nice yacht in the Bahamas would be more than acceptable.

The problem is so much bigger than the man who has merely chosen to embody it; it's in the lies that he has been paid to tell, and which the media has been paid to publish. They persist in millions of foggy minds in whose arteries flows the mortal fear of the acknowledgment that governments lie about everything all the time. It is necessary for governments, and the corporations in whose interests they operate, to proclaim without reservation, in spite of the effect it might have on their mounds of money so high that they can't see past them, that this is a real emergency. Business will no longer be usual. It's got to stop.

The news this week is about Ebell's colleague, Christopher Horner, who recently published a book of sick jokes called: "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming". John Stewart said to him:

I read that IPCC report, and I got to tell ya, yours is more interesting-- you know all the graphs and the other things, all the data, I didn't care for it. Yours I liked: cartoons.

Horner replied: It's like the [cartoons of] dead polar bears in Al Gore's movie. You see, real polar bears can swim.

They just can't eat because seals easily swim away from them in open water.

He then went on and on and on about how you can't believe the scientists because they all warned us about global cooling in the 1970s -- when some of them suggested that the next ice age was due to come in 20,000 years or so, and the speculation made it to the front cover of Newsweek. At the time we didn't have decades of satellite observations, hundreds of thousands of ice-core samples, a huge expansion in computer modeling power, glaciers in retreat, even more elevated levels of CO2, the ten warmest years on record all in the last two decades, or complete ownership of the government by the oil industry.

Not to worry, it's all just glacial melt-water under the bridge. He got a friend in the European Parliament to review his shoddy book, and pen at least one howling falsehood in every single paragraph. Our kids in 150 years time, the ones who survive the die-off, are going to pick up this book, look at the date, and shake their heads with pity.

Meanwhile, Myron has left a quote in an article that got published next week about the resignation of Nicholas Stern after none of his recommendations were taken up by the UK government. Quite wisely, he saw no point in remaining to greenwash this US-backed regime.

Now without a direct connection to power through his Republican party connections (where his CEI connections are now no longer undeclared), Myron has set himself the task of documenting all the failures of the new tribe in charge of the government to properly implement any effective measures. Done properly, this job would be a useful contribution if it highlighted errors and corruption in the system early enough to fix them.

Forget it. Nothing can come good from this man.

Kick them while they're not down

You'd think the denial lobby would be in retreat, but they're still going at it full throttle with their suitcases full of cash and leaked confidential drafts in attempt to head off the coming IPCC report. This particular 53 page Fraser Institute document of false facts is going to come in handy as panels of has-been know-nothings associated to people on the big-oil pay-roll are allowed on TV to counter the real science with fake science, because we'll be able to look up and bust the fake science according to its page and paragraph number.

Real science stands on an audit trail leading back to actual experiments and instrumental data. Fake science traces its context-stripped quotes through -- if not to -- secret action plans paid for by profitable vested interests. The plan instructed its readers "DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE". This is exactly what we're going to do as and when we need to.

Meanwhile last November, Ebell was hired by coal-funded Texas representative Phil King to pose as an expert who hurried through a PowerPoint presentation at a meeting so that the politician could channel his spirit when subsequently uttering lies like: "global warming issues are at best highly speculative". The corporate owned legislature of the polluted state of Texas is fast-tracking 16 huge new coal power stations, knowing that change is in the air, and it's their duty to make as much smokey as possible before that happens.

There is some hope rising out of Congress where a new non-Republican chair of the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform has begun hearings on how a former White House man, current Exxon employee, and friend of Ebell, Philip Cooney, specifically edited government science press releases to mislead the public about what was being discovered. I hope they issue subpoenas for these two hacks. I'd like to see Ebell properly cross-examined for his testimony, rather than come up as usual against some wishy-washy news reporter who can be fooled by a little bit of media-training.

It's still too early to tell, and too late to act. The massive die-off which will herald the arrival of the Myron Ebell Climate is but a few decades away. These men are working double-shifts to ensure that the end will come as soon as possible. Apparently Exxon ceased funding to the CEI in 2006 -- not that anyone noticed. When asked about this, Ebell said:

Like any company, [Exxon] are concerned about both policies and image... We're not at the mercy of our funders for what we believe. But we are dependent on them for funding to help promote our programs... Obviously, we would like to find a lot more funding on energy and global warming than we've had.

But there's a problem here, and it's name is Lee Raymond, the saggy-jowled 68 year old former CEO of Exxon who oversaw their enemy of the planet policy with a 400 million dollar retirement package burning a hole in his pocket. He's not going to want to see his great work undone before it has come to fruition, and certainly doesn't care if the world continues to exist as a habitable place after he's dead. What do you think he's going to do with all this Exxon money that has been legally declared as his, and now can be spent in the dark? It's a serious issue. He enjoys seeing the world die, and has the money to pay for the scene.

The reported cancellation of Exxon's funding of the CEI, or whatever office of disinformation which supercedes it, is wholly ineffective and not even a gesture. In order for anything to go on, the Corporation:

• must publically disown everything the CEI then, now, and continues to say about climate change.


• must fully apologize and account for all the disinformation that the CEI and other funded bodies have promulgated on their behalf.


• must fund an independent awareness campaign about the threat of climate change, which goes through all the well-known doubts, explaining why they are unfounded and how they secretly promoted by them.

Things have to change. Justice must be done and seen to be done. If Exxon refuses to take any of these measures, then it must be closed down forthwith because its existance is incompatible with the life on this planet.