Bob Carter set to join Myron Ebell's armed madhouse

Myron Ebell has put his name down on the side of the anti-health care reform rioters with this sarcastic post:

Nothing like it ever happened during President Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq or the Republican Congress’s continual attempts to starve orphans and widows. The left always made their objections politely and using good grammar. Code Pink were a charming group of people. I don’t even remember an inappropriate slogan on a tee-shirt or a bumper sticker.

This is not a surprise. He's always in favour of any powerful private interests that make a fortune out of market-failure and mass misery.

"But both sides are equally raucous," you say. "How can you tell which side is right?"

Determining which of the sides is right is a matter for assessing the arguments, which we won't do here.

But you can easily spot the side that is wrong -- it's the side that is lying!.

Here's some of their statements:

• A 77 year old with a brain tumour wouldn't get treated in England because their life is less valuable


• Death panels will be set up to advise old people to end their lives.


• Anyone over 59 in Britain is ineligible for treatment for heart disease.


• Dental patients use superglue to fix their teeth because the waiting list is too long.


• The extreme and costly human misery that is the US health care system is perfectly okay and the best possible world.

This whole issue would a minor one that, like gun control in America, wouldn't matter to the rest of the world because it only kills Americans -- except for the fact that it demonstrates how systematic institutional lying (from Myron Ebell and bodies like the CEI) succeeds in the the face of the most clear-cut immediate evidence.

That is why Chomsky and Roy have warned that this so-called democracy might be the endgame for the human race -- because lying works, and there are people as evil as Myron Ebell and those who pay for him and put him on the TV who do not care no matter how dire the consequences.

Myron's previous blogpost was kind of similar. In the same way, he equates the two sides of a debate on a common characteristic (neither of them is a full-time and accredited climate scientist), and says they are the same, even though one side bases their statements on a fair assessment of the science out there and the CO2 reduction effects of the legal measures taken (he's a lawyer), and the other doesn't.

Anyway, the argument is over. That means that if you are a spokesman who denies the severity of climate change, you have a lot of explaining to do with regards to the data. If you don't address it, and pretend it's not there, then you are quite obviously talking horse-shit.

Myron ends his article with the usual swipe at Jim Hansen, thus:

My point is that prominent scientists with long publications records, such as Bob Carter, are routinely described by the media as not being climate scientists and really not reputable scientists at all if they aren’t on the alarmist bandwagon.

On the other hand, lawyers expressing alarmist views are described as prominent scientists. And the scientists regularly put forward in the media as the world’s leading climate experts often turn out to be computer modelers with little or no background in climate science, Ph. D.s who spent their entire careers in administration, or astronomers who are experts on the atmosphere of Venus.

Bob Carter has form, with his positive appraisal of the
of Idso and Fred Singer's (that one) Nonscientific International Panel on Climate Change in June 2009.

That's pretty recent.

Maybe this dude is positioning himself to be one of Myron Ebell's "qualified scientists" like the esteemed Fred Singer.

Tim Lambert has been on Bob Carter's case in these posts here.

I'm looking forward to Myron citing Carter more often to back up his lies in the future. His list of names is getting a little too repetitive and short these days, and it needs some freshening up.