Colder brains digested

This 24 April 2009 Cooler Heads Digest issue has a long and boring ramble from Myron Ebell about the recent Congressional hearings that's long and boring.

He says there were more than sixty witnesses, and he chose to highlight particular individuals from it for praise. These are:

• The Exxon funded moron David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation.


• A Dick Cheney off-the-record energy task force member and Dow Chemicals lobbyist with no other known qualifications, Paul Cicio of the "Industrial Energy Consumers of America"


• Known nothing word-monger Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute.


• Cato institute Scholar Robert Michaels who had a lot to say about the California energy economy which -- going by his long resume that includes a large number of papers explaining how great the 2002 California electricity crisis was for consumers -- is probably all wrong (but who's watching?)

The qualities of the witnesses so far listed on-line might not be great, but Myron Ebell didn't link to it in order to make it harder for his willfully ignorant dear readers to verify that his selection was appalling.

But his long article was pretty boring.

What was much more interesting is scale of the lying that was included in the next piece, penned by a one Julie Walsh wife of some pointless stuffed shirt at the Heritage Foundation:

Arctic Ice Recovers

Last century's and this century's sun make look the same, but they are very different. 'Between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were very rare and temperatures were low. Then sunspot frequency grew until, between 1930 and 2000, the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years. The oceans can cause up to several decades of delay before air temperatures respond fully to this solar "Grand Maximum." Now that the Sun is becoming less active again, global temperatures have fallen for seven years,' according [www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/Willie_Soon-Its_the_Sun_Stupid.pdf!] to Willie Soon, a solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Is it any wonder that, despite many news stories to the contrary, Arctic ice is now increasing and almost back up to average levels? However, Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan write in their Washington Post April 7 article, "New Data Show Rapid Arctic Ice Decline; Proportion of Thicker, More Persistent Winter Cover Is the Lowest on Record":

The Arctic sea ice cover continues to shrink and become thinner, according to satellite measurements and other data released yesterday, providing further evidence that the region is warming more rapidly than scientists had expected.

That's right. Some scary results by the scientists with the data can easily be debunked by some smiling woman associated with the right wing noise machine, merely by the citations of an idiot who publishes on a website called www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com and a couple of out-of-context graphs selected out of this directory.

We don't know which articles those graphs belong to, but let's go over her selection. Julie Walsh chose to point to this one:



which shows a slight two-day trending upwards from below average for the last few days of April, and skipped this one:




which shows a serious, consistent and gigantic decline for the month of September.

This is as bad as financial analysts who are trying to off-load their stock by pumping up a small up-turn in the Dow Jones average in order to sell it to some gullible punters.

Only much worse, because a lot more people are going to die.

Julie Walsh was a home educator for thirteen years, according to her bio. If this is her attitude to evidence, lord knows what wise characters she has educated now that will ensure the complete suicide of the next generation once they inherit their positions of authority in the US political system from their parental connections.

We are so screwed.