A highly speculative intelligence

In yesterday's Washington Post, the article Warming scenario sees flooded airport -- as if that's the most important part of the real estate -- took a stunningly stupid statement from Myron.

Get ready to laugh. Here's what was printed:

Despite satellite evidence of shrinking ice caps, some groups say climate-change predictions are exaggerated.

"They are all based on highly speculative computer models," said Myron Ebell, director of global-warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit public policy foundation based in Washington.

"Sea levels have been rising at pretty much the same rate since they started to keep records in the early 19th century," he said. "There's nothing new in sea levels rising and there's nothing new to indicate the rate of sea-level rise will increase."

Now, you'd think even a Washington Post reporter would have noticed that you don't need accurate records to tell whether sea-level rise is new or not. If there are lots of ancient towns and villages off the coast and underwater, then sea level rise is not new; otherwise it hasn't happened before.* Also, these "highly speculative computer models" are in fact 3D geographical maps, the same kind as what is used to design reservoirs and dams, and about as "highly speculative" as a wind-tunnel simulation.

Oh, the report, from November 2007, is here.


* Someone who refers back to the geological record of 10,000 years ago to contradict this statement rather than to clarify its obvious meaning as it is expressed in few enough words is a dipstick.

The CEI's incompetent web-design

Not a lot of news coming through the wires about Myron Ebell lately. The truth was always going to come out that he was a whining, illogical, ignorant maggot, and that Climate Change was actually the dire threat to civilization we knew all along. But like a bogus faith healer, Myron's purpose was always to delay the diagnosis and cure of the disease for long enough for it to become terminal.

Myron's homepage at the Completely Bent Institute has fallen off the front page of the google search for Myron Ebell since they've upgraded the site without any redirects. Now his old link at expert 125 is broken. I don't see any point in giving him google juice for his new home page by linking to it earlier than necessary. His mug-face is no longer in view.

The new site is much slower to load, and doesn't have anything to offer, except a presentation of their recent video clips embedded onto every single page. You can watch this YouTube of a Fox business TV interview with the bulging and overflowing John Berlau below about the nationalization of the Northern Rock bank in the UK. Fox TV news guests are not hired for their knowledge, and this one certainly doesn't break the mold. Everything he said was false.



Berlau condemned the UK government for not selling out to the popular tycoon Branson who runs part of the national railways at great cost to the taxpayer as well as passengers, after all the other serious bidders had pulled out.

The issue was that the taxpayers had already taken on all the bank's liabilities. All that remained was the management and a profit opportunity which, I am sure, Berlau would have preferred was given away to the nearest bum on the street rather than be operated by a bank manager hired by the government with some oversight, given the fact that it exactly was the unaccountable private management that got us here in the first place. He added:

It shows we are doing something right in America, with the mortgage problem. We're allowing mergers to take place -- Bank of America to take over Countrywide -- things like layoffs, whereas Brown and his equivalent of the Treasury Secretary Alastair Darling and the Northern Rock board, they didn't want lay-offs, they wanted Northern Rock's foundation to make its charitable...

Three weeks later, the plan for restructuring and layoffs while under government control is announced, and we're getting the start of a run of huge bank bail-outs in America.

None of this will reflect badly on Berlau or on Fox News who put him on the airwaves, because their job is simply to lie to the public about fiscal matters, so that the real actors -- the rich and the owners of these media companies -- can get on with what they want to do without interference in the conduct of affairs that are against the public interest.

The CEI is also trying its hand at some more video releases, after the success of their execrable they call it pollution; we call it life ads of 2006. Here's their new one:



Things have gotten so hard in the denial camp that now all they have left is character assassination of Al Gore. Their argument was well summarized by Marcus Brigstocke on The Now Show last week as follows:

As we all know, Climate Change is not really happening. It's just a big lie to get more taxes out of us. See, I've been doing a bit of research, and it turns out that what happened was a few years ago Al Gore bribed two thousand top climate scientists from around the world to tell a massive lie that the planet's warming up dangerously fast. Then he bribed the thousands of scientists who'd been peer reviewing their work, and he also put some big stones under the sea to make it rise a bit, and warmed it up by pouring tea in it. Then he went and persuaded all the polar bears in the Arctic to start hiding ice, so that he could pretend that it was all melting...

It was a truly brilliant plan. He'd have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for some vastly astute genius taxpayers catching him out. These people are not whining, illogical, ignorant maggots. No way. And I won't have anyone saying they are. There is no Climate Change. It's a tax wheeze. And there's no more truth in it than the stupid idea that the Earth is round. Duh! We'd all fall off it.