The Jessica Lynching of Copenhagen

The Copenhagen diagnosis, which is materially supported by professors around the world with access to non-imaginary data, concludes:

The ice sheets are both losing mass (and hence contributing to sea level rise). This was not certain at the time of the IPCC report.

Arctic sea ice has declined faster than projected by IPCC.

Greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to track the upper bounds of IPCC projections.

Observed global temperature changes remain entirely in accord with IPCC projections, i.e. an anthropogenic warming trend of about 0.2C per decade with superimposed short-term natural variability.

Sea level has risen more than 5 centimeters over the past 15 years, about 80% higher than IPCC projections from 2001.

Perhaps most importantly, the report articulates a much clearer picture of what has to happen if the world wants to keep future warming within the reasonable threshold (2°C) that the European Union and the G8 nations have already agreed to in principle.

In other words, Myron Ebell was right. Our climate models were inaccurate. But the changes are much worse than predicted. Everything is out of balance, and your children are going to live and die with it -- not just your great grandchildren and beyond.

Myron knows this, which is why he is not talking about it. He's got more interesting things to talk about, like a set of hacked emails from 1999 to 2009 between a small subset of the scientists who had obviously been driven insane by the work of the well-funded climate denial industry.

We, at the Climate, are in favour of disclosure, and would like to see more leaks from all sides -- including things like the 1998 smoking memo which involved Myron Ebell conspiring to:

Identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach. These will be individuals who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate. Rather, this team will consist of new faces who will add their voices to those recognized scientsts who are already vocal.

You won't be finding Ebell exposing those fraudulent scientists as incompetent, because they trained them and paid them to talk shite.

The emails themselves, as leaked, aren't the problem. What is the problem is the organized campaign to publicize and lie about them all over the press for the next 2 weeks in order to obscure the real bad news coming from Copenhagen.

This is standard media practice that always works with an incompetent and immature press that runs away from bad news.

We saw it with the feel-good Jessica Lynch story used to distract the news coverage from the violence, horror and first-degree murder that was ongoing during the first weeks of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

The story was substantially embellished with false information like a Hollywood bedtime story to help the public sleep at night while their out-of-control government committed acts of slaughter day after day in their name.

This is just the same. And the timing of it is perfectly arranged.

Myron Ebell is part of the PR campaign to keep it going along, throwing in his own brand of lies to help it get maximum impact.

For example, he writes:

The next bit of context is that CEI -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which is where I work) -- had filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open a regulatory decision that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare on the basis of an affidavit by Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute. Michaels explained that it had recently been revealed that Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, had destroyed much of the original raw data he used to compile the global mean temperature record. EPA relied on the CRU global temperature record, but the lack of underlying data means that the CRU record cannot be analyzed or reproduced. That means that EPA must take Professor Jones’s work on trust, which of course is standard operating procedure in all good climate research. Dr. Michaels is clearly just being disagreeable. Everyone knows that we can trust Professor Jones’s honesty and utter scientific competence.

As Myron very well knows, there is a second global mean temperature record, established by James Hansen, known as GISTEMP. After a protracted battle from the climate change denial community, the raw data and the software to process it was disclosed in 2007.

Nothing was learnt, except that scientists write terrible software; an open source project was established to clean it up. But the results were unchallenged.

Same would happen if there was full release of the CRU data -- which is derived from the same reality. It's a stupid policy not to release it, because this is (a) bad practice, and (b) gives something for Myron Ebell and his pals to lie about.

Ebell has to lie about the veracity of the dataset, and he has to lie that the entire world record of climate change information resided in that dataset in order to maximize the damage of the first lie.

Knowing the full extent of the organized evil represented by Myron Ebell's life's work, it should have been easy to predict that something like this was going to happen.

The human species is entering the phase of resignation, and coming to terms with the fact that the funded support and social tolerance of organized public liars like Myron Ebell means that we fully deserve to die.

As the ecosystems on which our lives depend collapse, we'll find out what it feels to be a smoker dying of lung cancer -- we had it coming.

Myron Ebell finds his death panels

Remember that trumped up death panel saga over socialized health-care? Well, Myron has been doing his duty and reading up the whole Climate Change Bill before congress and thinks he has his death panel scam in the form of Section 707.

He writes:

Section 705 of Kerry-Boxer, S. 1733, requires that the EPA Administrator must submit a report to Congress every four years beginning in 2013 including a determination of whether the legislation and other policies in place are sufficient to avoid greenhouse gas concentrations above 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2-e).

In other words: It includes a determination of whether the policy working. (Myron doesn't like this, because he doesn't want the policy to work.)

Since concentrations are already at 430 ppm CO2-e and rising every year, there is no way that the policies in Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer can keep them below 450. The U. S. economy could shut down completely, and emissions from other countries would soon push atmospheric levels past 450.

Myron has explained that he knows the policy is not going to work to keep down CO2 concentrations anyway.

That's where section 707 of Kerry-Boxer is triggered. Section 707 directs the President to use existing authority to keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below 450 ppm CO2-e.

In other words, if the policy is failing to achieve the desired outcome, the President must use his powers to do something about it.

Note how in Myron Ebell speak, zero carbon economy = no economy.

So much for the Roman Empire, folks. They didn't have an economy, because they did not burn any coal. But we're so much cleverer than the Romans, aren't we? We can make electricity without burning coal. But that doesn't matter.

Myron continues:

All those free ration coupons that big companies like Duke Energy and Exelon and P G and E are hoping to get won’t be worth anything because the President will be obligated to use whatever statutory authority exists to reduce emissions and get greenhouse gases back down to below 450 ppm CO2-e. All the command-and-control tools of the Clean Air Act will have to be used to require emissions reductions.

What section 707 actually says:

The President shall direct relevant Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions identified in the reports submitted under sections 705 and 706.

As Myron explains (rightfully, for a change) "appropriate actions" will probably not include giving away all the free pollution permits the President has at his disposal.

Myron checks in his discovery with his friend Senator Vitter (R-Louisiana) [flood? what flooded city?] to remind corporate America that they are legally bound to consider short-term profits above threats to the survival of the human species.

This kind of legislative farting around might be entertaining to you, Myron, because you're old enough not to live to see the real consequences. You can take comfort from the fact that you will die of natural causes before the end of this century, following a long and worthless life.

The death you have dedicated your life to bringing on is reserved for the younger generations. Thanks for that.

By the way, I strongly recommend looking at: Desmogblog's Another silly climate petition exposed for the way that you can technically analyse the signing pattern on a denial letter to uncover the networks of old farts who want the human race to die.

Last liar standing

A coming to terms with reality has affected the US Chamber of commerce.

Myron Ebell explains:

"It appears that the Chamber has caved under enormous pressure from some of its biggest member companies. They have reluctantly enlisted in the effort to reward these big special interests with gigantic windfall profits at the expense of consumers and small businesses," said Myron Ebell, CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy.

"We invite small businesses whose interests are no longer being well-represented by the Chamber on this critical issue to drop their membership in the U. S. Chamber and join us at CEI in fighting against all energy-rationing legislation, even so-called compromises that only partly wreck the economy. We welcome their support. We will not capitulate," said Ebell.

Yeah, there will always be a home for conspiracy theorists at the CEI. We have your best death at heart. Here is one of those heart-warming fairy tales to tell their kids:



Meanwhile, over in the real world, here is a congressional hearing with Exxon where they explain just how little research budget they put into non-fossil fuel energy.

"So if you don't put research dollars in, does the new technologies come from the tooth fairy? How does it show up?"

Profit Care in California

Yesterday, Myron showed his sweaty face at the Rape All Natural Resources Summit sponsored by TuCARE in California.

What the hell is TuCARE? It stands for Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment.

Tuolumne County contains the famous Yosemite National Park, and happens to be one of those Republican strongholds in the almost sane state electorate of California.

The fact that Myron Ebell got invited as a keynote speaker to this event (along with the elected Republican state representatives) suggests -- without any further information -- that this is likely to be PR front group infested with lies and misinformation.

Guilt by association definitely applies here

As the gold motherlode press release of the meeting reports:

"If we thin our forests, science proves that we get more water yield," says TuCare President Mike Albrecht. "There's a real strong connection between forests and our watersheds."

I can't imagine what type of "science" he could be referring to, but the definitions of his words couldn't be clearer:

thin our forests - PR speak for "clear-cutting", also known as "thinning by 100%". Clear-cutting is the most cost-effective solution to apply when your economic model works on a concept of absolute property rights to convert the totality of this resource into money forthwith, and use this money to buy up the next tranche of forest to repeat the stripping on. This is known as a "sustainable business model".

water yield - The profit dividend yield from water company shares. These profits are predicted to go up, following a spate of resource mismanagement and drought -- just as Enron's profits went up when they engineered the California electricity crisis. It's important for the water companies to protect these profits by investing in spin and lies and by flying Myron Ebell over to their offices to explain how it's done.

It's important to note that, although Myron calls himself an "energy expert", he doesn't have anything useful to say about the capitalism-induced California electricity crisis of 2002. Instead, he blames every crisis on "regulation" -- even when the story was about deregulation.

If it doesn't fit with his bogus narrative, it didn't happen.

The fact is, markets -- when organized in the way he thinks they should be -- favour profits, NOT efficiency. And so much money can be made out of the inefficient management of natural resources, that the consequences are inevitable.