The 2009 International Conference on Climate Change Acceleration

The Heartland Institute has helpfully rounded up all the top climate change liars in one place to... well, I'm not sure what for, really.

Myron Ebell, of course, is there. His bio, published for the purpose of promoting his qualifications to speak to this gathering is pretty revealing. First the semi-positive sentences:

• Myron Ebell is director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). [a job he holds on the basis of his ability to insert unfiltered lies into the network media]


• He chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, representing more than two dozen non-profit groups in the United States and abroad that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies.[a ficticious organization of no consequence]


• He has testified before six U.S. House and Senate committees.[at the invitation of know-nothing Republicans. Here is one from December 2007]


• He has debated scores of government officials and environmental advocacy groups on radio and in person. [due to media incompetence and corruption which gives access to the least qualified person]

The man doesn't even have a book to his name, like so many other junkmen in his business.

Then we come to the other half of the bio which shows that being called a complete and unmitigated moron by as many people as possible is an important part of his image:

• Greenpeace featured Ebell and three of his CEI colleagues in "A Field Guide to Climate Criminals" distributed at the UN climate meeting in Montreal in December 2005.


• In its November 17, 2005 issue, Rolling Stone magazine named Ebell one of six "Misleaders" on global warming, along with President George W. Bush, Senator James Inhofe, Michael Crichton, and others.


• In November 2004, as a result of a BBC Radio interview, seven members of the British House of Commons introduced a motion to censure Ebell "in the strongest possible terms."


• In its May 22, 2004 special "Issues and Answers" issue, National Journal profiled Ebell as one of 10 people who would lead the global warming debate during the next presidential administration.


• The Clean Air Trust in March 2001 named Ebell its "Villain of the Month" for his role in persuading the Bush administration not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

Sadly, the existance of the Myron Ebell Climate closely documenting the malicious basis of his propaganda as it evolves over the years does not count as one of his achievements. Still: in a hundred years' time the MEC blog will be an important part of the documentary history relating to how a relatively small band of obviously idiotic corporate-funded liars were able to break the connection between well-established science and public policy in a way that sealed our fate. If a thousand people did what the Climate is doing, we would have driven these vermin out long ago. But one has to do what is right, whether or not it is popular.

Myron's contribution, scheduled right about now, is in "Track 4: Economics and Politics - The Political Outlook for Energy-Rationing Policies" on the subject of "Prospects for Energy Rationing: It's Not as Grim as it Looks".

It'll be something relatively uncontroversial about how the governance of the United States is so utterly dysfunctional it cannot implement any of the policies necessary to deal with the climate crisis. This is good news-- if you happen to be into nihilism, which everyone at this conference obviously is.

Speaking of nihilism, my eye was caught by one of the keynote speeches:

12:00 noon - 2:00 pm Lunch and keynote speakers
Art Robinson - Nobel Prize for Death

I looked him up, and found the usual horseshit:

Unprincipled opportunists -- falsely claiming that DDT is dangerous to the environment -- managed to engineer a world-wide ban of DDT. DDT had eradicated malaria from the developed world and was well on its way to eradicating it from the less developed countries at the time this ban of DDT was instituted. The initiation of DDT use against malaria was rewarded by a Nobel Prize, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT had saved hundreds of millions of lives.

One of the principal political figures who worked to ban DDT was none other than Al Gore.

As a result of the DDT ban, more than 30 million children in Africa and Asia have died from DDT-preventable malaria, and an estimated 500 million adults are today chronically ill from this disease. The ban of DDT was the worst act of technological genocide in human history.

Oh, man! Not! That! Again!

DDT worked great against malaria until the indiscriminate (and very profitable) use of the chemical in agriculture caused so much resistance in mosquitos that it was no longer useful for this purpose. As the summary says:

The evolution of resistance to DDT in mosquitos has greatly reduced its effectiveness in many parts of the world, and current WHO guidelines require that before the chemical is used in an area, susceptibility of local mosquitos to DDT must be confirmed.[82] The appearance of DDT-resistance is largely due to its use in agriculture, where it was used in much greater amounts than the relatively small quantities used for disease prevention. According to one study that attempted to quantify the lives saved by banning agricultural uses of DDT and thereby slowing the spread of resistance, "it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria."[18]

Meanwhile, from the street, a short video by the good people of Desmogblog: