Everyday Scientist

co2 = life … the cei lies to us

May 24, 2006 at 7:34 pm | sam | science and the public

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced a few ads promoting CO₂ and carbon-producing fuels in general. Go watch them, they are ridiculous. “Energy” tells us that CO₂ is a wonderful thing and it implies that politicians want us to stop breathing.

“Glaciers” is even better. It flashes two Science articles that have the word “Growth” in the title and claim that there’s credible science out there that shows that the ice caps are actually growing—not shrinking, as the fearmongers would have us believe. But I looked up these two articles (here and here), and CEI flat out lies to us. The articles only report on a small region in which snowfall has increased. But that in no way disputes that our ice caps are melting and that our globe is warming. In fact the acticles acknowledge global warming, even as a factor in the increased snowfall. One article’s abstract states: “Winter elevation changes are shown to be linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation,” which is sensitive to global climate change. A citing article states: “Atmospheric modeling indicates that increasing snow accumulation has been important over the last decades, perhaps in response to weak warming, especially in coastal regions.” The other paper claims that the increased snowfall might mitigate immediate sea-level rise, a statement that inherently acknowledges global warming as an Earth-altering trend.

The real deception of the CEI ad is that it claims there is disagreement in the scientific community over global climate change. Not only is that claim false, these two papers fail to support that view, regardless.

The worst part is that CEI’s tactics will probably be effective in confusing naïve people (which is most of us).