Ascending to despair

Another week and another badly formatted post by Myron Ebell appears on www.globalwarming.org entitled Obama speech to the UN (September 22, 2009 @ 10:57 am).

The same text, only with paragraph breaks, pops up on www.openmarket.org, also entitled Obama speech to the UN (September 22, 2009 @ 10:57 am).

At around same time the same crappy text, with boldfaced bits, appears on www.opposingviews.com entitled Disputing the Global Warming "Facts" in Obama's UN Speech. This new site is an instant fail because it has somehow rated the CEI as a "Verified Expert". What kind of "verification" would that be then?

What was this thrice self-syndicated article about? Well, there is this speech by Obama at the hastily convened summit on climate change (the speed shows you the signs of panic among world leaders on this issue), and Myron's contribution is to pick the following five statements from it that are true to the best science we have:

• [T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.


• Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.


• More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.


• More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.


• On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.

...and call them lies without making any proper arguments.

For example, to point two, Myron writes:

Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago. The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

which has little to do with predicted, future, avoidable, and self-inflicted rise in sea levels in the next two centuries and beyond. But what are his readers who lack logical faculties going to notice?

Myron then signs off with the usual brand of harebrained hogwash:

His policy prescription for poor countries is to promise them massive "financial and technical assistance".

The track record of paying off poor countries is that it has lined the pockets of corrupt leaders and bureaucracies with billions and tens of billions of dollars, but has done nothing to help those countries become prosperous. What these countries need is free markets and abolishing barriers to trade.

The global warming policies advocated by the Obama Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress would raise trade barriers and foster energy poverty throughout the world. Energy rationing is not the way forward and is not a message of hope for the poorest people in the world, who lack access to electricity and modern transportation.

ie don't give money or technology to poor countries; instead, the best way to help them is for fat Americans to continue to burn more coal.

Meanwhile, Myron Ebell is appearing on yet another of CEI's many front groups, the bizarrely creative commons licensed FreedomAction, where some extra info appears on his bio page:

Myron has lived in Washington since the 1980s, but has never gone native. He knows how the political establishment works, but has remained an outsider. He aims in his political work to speak truth to power and says that, "The people's voice must be heard above the clamor of the special interests if freedom and limited government are to survive."

Myron and his wife live in Prince George's County Maryland. They have four children and are longtime members of the Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes in Washington.

Well, that's good to know.

Still, it's a bit of a bummer to leave you there, so let's end with the final paragraph from Obama's speech:

But the journey is long and the journey is hard. And we don't have much time left to make that journey. It's a journey that will require each of us to persevere through setbacks, and fight for every inch of progress, even when it comes in fits and starts. So let us begin. For if we are flexible and pragmatic, if we can resolve to work tirelessly in common effort, then we will achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner, and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of our children.