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.