On The Muddy

A couple months back Myron Ebell appeared on an NBC TV program called "On The Money". Whatever it is, it certainly isn't On The Truth. In it he reported on the work of Professor Patterson whose name appears -- predictably -- on the List of Climate Change Deniers. Ebell had read Patterson's article in the 2007-06-20 edition of the Financial Post where it was published, instead of, say, in a peer-reviewed journal where there is somewhat of an attempt to get things accurate. Newspapers, on the whole, are not responsible for the never-ending stream of visceral lies which they publish. Apparently it's up to the readers who do not know it's all lies to stop buying them.

By examining his mud cores from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords and using "sophisticated technology", Patterson and his team found a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators. From this he was able to prove that the CO2 composition of the atmosphere has nothing to do with the temperature of the globe. He thus over-turned large bodies of science based on ice cores, known -- unlike mud that's probably been through numerous worm stomachs before settling for good -- for trapping bubbles of clean air as the snowflakes settle into ice.

Patterson then explains the old sun-spots-cosmic rays-white cloud formation nonsense which would only matter if the effect was strong enough to outweigh the known effects of doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Which it isn't. It's not going to stabilize the climate, and it's certainly not going to reverse it.

Prepare for an era of global cooling, Myron Ebell, whose bent logic allows him to doubt all scientific predictions made since one member of the field said something in 1848 which turned out to be wrong, says.

This is very silly.

Mistakes are made and improved upon on the basis of ever-growing understanding of science. The accuracy of past predictions is likely to be a lower bound for the accuracy of future predictions, not an upper bound. Myron Ebell, however, is paid to be wrong. A functioning news system would never ever put him on air.

Psychadelic shopping aisle

Myron Ebell's excretions are more or less limited to wingnuts and his own CEI staff blog where his incisive rebuff of this newsweek column ["The Truth About Denial" By Sharon Begley, 13 August 2007]. He picked up on a small factual error in paragraph 22 of a 33 paragraph piece where it was actually the bonehead Fred Smith who made an initial phone call to the swift-boating and CIA-outing columnist Robert Novak and not Myron Ebell. Well, who gives a toss when the preceding 21 paragraphs of well-known serious allegations go unmentioned? Of course they aren't!

Myron continues:

On top of all the factual errors, the thesis is ridiculous. The idea that those opposed to global warming alarmism are well funded is easily disproved. Begley and her crew could have spent 10 minutes on the web comparing the annual budgets of the alarmist groups with the anti-alarmist groups. CEI has one of the larger efforts on our side, which amounts to less than one quarter of our annual four million dollar budget. Grist, the online environmental news and opinion outlet, this year quoted an unpublished foundation study that estimated that the alarmist groups have been spending $100-150 million a year to promote their cause. That’s not counting all the free media coverage and promotion or the outlandish scaremongering of scientists like James Hansen of NASA.

The reason that Begley can regurgitate propaganda as if it were established fact is because the alarmists’ megaphone is so large and ours is so small. As several Hill staffers have told me, Members of Congress have to be uncommonly brave to resist the global warming bandwagon because the alarmist message is pounded into them. Back home, their constituents are swayed by multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, which are echoed by Newsweek, Time, CBS, ABC, etc.

Whose bum was this pulled out of? Why don't you just throw in the full costs of those multi-billion dollar Antarctic expeditions for drilling ice-cores and doing the science which supports the "global warming alarmism"? After all, it's an integral part of their argument, while on your side you just have badly researched science fiction and illegitimate access to the public airways.

We know you're just a pack of water carriers for big oil, among which are the most profitable corporations of all time. Yes, your budgets are minuscule. It's astonishing just how much damage you can do with a modest amount of money and a compliant media who are on your side.

Fine. You've won this one. You've found the lethal weaknesses in human politics and exploited them. Your children and everyone else's children are going to die because of it. Thanks a lot. We'll put your gravestone on the list of monuments to piss against, along with that lying, torturing, murdering bastard Tony Blair.