The usual dipsticks

Myron Ebell phoned in at minute 30 of G Gordon Liddy show:

Here's how Gordon the Watergate burglar began his show:

Attitude is everything. It's critically important. And thus a man seeking a job in the Mississippi sheriff's department was being interviewed, and the sergent said: "Your qualifications all look good, but there is an attitude suitability test you must take before you can be accepted." Sliding a service pistol across the desk, he said: "Take this pistol and go out and shoot six illegal aliens, six drug dealers, six muslim extremists, six liberal democrats, and a rabbit."

"I love this job. But why the rabbit?"

"That's the attitude," said the sergent. "When can you start?"

Here's the transcript of Myron's 15 minutes of teious waffle, during which time they successfully made no reference at all to the hole in the sea floor that was endlessly pissing oil out into the infinite blue ocean.

G Gordon Watergate Burglar: This IPCC, they said that thousands of scientists backed its claims on man-made global warming. But this may not be the truth. Could you speak on that?

Ebell: Heh-heh. Well, you know it's never been the truth, and various people have pointed this out going way back to the 90s when the first reports were being issued by the UN global warming panel, and they were claiming that all the scientists participating agreed with the whole report, and Richard Lindzen, a professor at MIT, a very distinguished scientist tried to get his name taken off the second assessment report in 1995 because he said:

"I don't agree with it; there are a lot of things I don't know about in other chapters, but I don't even agree with all the things that I know about."

And they wouldn't take his name off.

So this has been clear, but the global warming alarmists have been repeated this over and over, but now a scientist very closely connected to the ClimateGate scandal, all the scientists in the scandal, and it's also very active in the IPCC has admitted that all the critics have said all along, which is, These reports really reflect the view of a very small group of scientists. And I would describe them as a cabal. Maybe not an organized conspiracy, but certainly they are acting to get the political conclusions that they want out of these reports, and it's really 20, 30, 40 scientists in total. All the rest are just window dressing.

Crook Gordon Liddy: Wow. And the press went for this hook line and sinker?

Ebell: Absolutely. The mainstream media has repeated this over and over again, and they get it from con-men like Joe Rahm at the Centre for American Progress, and Gavin Schmitt, who not only works at NASA but uses his NASA job to produce propaganda for a website called RealClimate. And these guys have just repeated these lies over and over again. They know they're not true. But they're political promoters.

Guns Gays and Lord: The mainstream media, when someone asserts something, they don't publish it as if it were gospel. They check it out.

Ebell: I think most of the MSM went missing on this issue a long time ago. They have simply parroted what they're told by the IPCC, what they're told by scientists at NASA and NOA, and the Federal Government, and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and when people point out that these statements simply aren't true, they just ignore them. They say, these people are seen as eccentrics or are being paide by industry, or there's always some reason to go after the credibility of the critic, but never to check into the credibility of the establishment position.

GGL: At this point it seems to me these days everyone is aware of the fact that the global warming business is a hoax.

Ebell: Well, in some ways I think it's too strong a word. It's a contrived crisis, I would call it. And if that's what you mean by hoax, that's fine.

There's a lot of people who have decided, some of them very sincerely in the scientific community, that global warming is a crisis, and they have decided to do anything necessary politically to advance the agenda that they think will solve or address the crisis.

now some of these people I don't think are sincere. They;'re just totally phoney. But I think some of them really believe that it is their god given right or duty to twist the science, because they think it's so important to save the planet, and therefore underhand and dishonest means are somehow justified.

Course this goes back. Theres a long argument in politics and philosophy about whether to what extend the ends ever do justify the means. And here I think you will find some people -- Steve Schnieder is a good example at Stanford, one of the real long time leaders of the global warming alarmists, going back to the 80s -- that in order to win your point politically you exaggerate and say things that aren't true. I think Schnieder is a sincere alarmist. I think some of the others are just out to make their careers and promote their own interests.

Great Gas Larynx: For some years now, things have been cooler than warm, the sunspot activity is down to zero, and it's anticipated that it's going to stay that way for some while, and the opposite is happening.

Ebell: Well Gordon I am kind of a skeptical contrarian kind of person who's always somewhat self-critical of my own beliefs. I don't get so wrapped up in them I can't see beyond them. I do know some people who get so convinced of something that reality never intrudes. They see what they want to see. I think some of these people are deeply deluded because they've become true believers, and once you get into that mode of just believing in something so strongly, you can explain away all the inconvenient facts that are brought to your attention.

And you see this over and over with websites like RealClimate where no matter what comes up they have an explanation for it. And the explanations often contradict one another, but they've always got an explanation. I don't full yunderstand the psychology, but that's my best guess.

G. Mumble Legpain: The problem as I see it is more than an academic discussion, because Obama seeks to use this as a justification to impose this huge energy tax on us, which is going to be very very damaging to the economy. Could throw us into a double dip recession. It's something we have to let people know, that this crisis which he doesn't want to let to go to waste. is bogus.

Ebell: Yes. I think you've hit the most important point. We're being asked to change our use of energy, and lower out standard of living, and pay a lot more for energy, and use a lot less of it, and really put our economy not into a double-dip recession, but really into permanent stagnation, on the basis of a theory for which a lot of the evidence has been cooked up. And because the establishment has defended these people, this small group of climate scientists, their work has never adequately been checked.

We've got the hockey stick, Steve MacIntyre and McKitrick demolished that. They're not climate scientists, but they looked into it and said, Hey wait a minute, the evidence isn't here.

And now we've got the climate gate scandal, and it showed that they're manipulating the temperature data, makes the last couple of decades a lot warmer than, say, the 1930s.

And so we're being asked to buy this whole suite of very expensive policies to make us very much poorer on the basis that we can trust these guys, and whenever we look they're wrong.

And so I think that our Senators and representatives need to step back and say, Let's not go this way. Let's let the science get sorted out. Let's be much more critical of it, and let's forget about these energy rationing bills which President Obama wants us to pass.

Great Grovelling Liar: I of course am very familiar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. My daughter and I are going to be joining you at dinner at the end of this week. But I have to confess that I don't know that much about Freedom Action. Could you tell us about this organization?

Ebell: Gordon, it's a sister organization. It's not officially affiliated with the CEI. And it's an activist group. We're involved in political pushing and shoving. We're not a think tank. And I invite your listeners to check us out at FreedomAction.org. Or to join our social network, FreedomAction.net. We're trying to mobilize grass roots of political activists through the net. We're trying to establish a social network for activists to communicate with each other, and discuss the issues, and figure out how to come up.

For example, we were very active in the last month promoting the Murkowski resolution which would have stopped President Obama and his Environemntal Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gasses without any congressional approval. Unfortunately last Thursday it was narrowly defeated, but the WhiteHouse really had to pull out all the stops, and majority leader Harry Reid has to pull out all the stops to defeat it. In fact Harry Reid had to promise several senators that he would have a vote on another alternative bill that would delay the EPA for two years, and that got people like Jim Webb of Virginia to switch his vote.

But J Rockerfeller of West Virginia said quite correctly in the debate, I am voting for the Murkowski resolution because I don't want EPA turning out the lights on America. And in fact that's what the EPA is going to be doing as they block new coal fired power plants and constrict our electricity supoplies. The lights are going to be going out, assuming our economy ever recovers and starts growing again. There will simply not be enough electricity.

Gum Monster Label: Well, China is coming on-line with a new coal-fired power plant every single week. [Ebell: Yes] And we're going to restrict ourselves?

Ebell: And this is the crazy world we live in, supposedly having to compete against China and people like Senator John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, and Lindsey Graham the Republican of South Carolina -- in fact he said this on the floor of the House, well if we don't start building a lot more windmills and solar panels and get off oil and coal, we're going to fall behind the Chinese, and they're going to win the war for the new clean energy economy.

In fact, they're building so much new coal fired capacity that they're building more in a year than we built in the last 20 years. The reason is because coal is the cheapest source of reliable electricity, and like the United States, they have very large coal reserves, and so we're losing the race for affordable energy, not for renewable energy.

GGL: Solar panels are not a reliable source of energy at all. They all have to be backed up by coal. It's bizarre. It's just bizarre. Doesn't make any sense.

The Twitter feed for the CEI gala is here, and it includes this crappy photo of Fred Smith, and this one of MacIntyre and McKitrick receiving the annual Julian Simon award for scientific charlatanism.