Lies, Damned Lies, and "We call it Life!"

The professional climate change deniers have mounted a campaign denouncing climate "alarmism" which started with editorials in major papers by Richard Lindzen and a couple of right wing hacks. The idea seems to be to counter Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Phase II from denial central is the so-called "Competitive Enterprise Institutes" pro CO2 ads now running in a few cities.

Jeff Masters of Wunderblog, no environmental bomb thrower, takes a close look at the CEI and its ads. He starts by pointing out who it is that is paying:

Who funds the Competitive Enterprise Institute?
A variety of businesses fund CEI, but the fossil-fuel industry is one of their main contributors. Exxon documents show that the company gave $270,000 to CEI in 2004 alone. $180,000 of that was earmarked for "global climate change and global climate change outreach." Exxon has contributed over $1.6 million to CEI since 1998. Other oil companies, such as Amoco and Texaco, also contribute to CEI, through the American Petroleum Institute. So, it is safe to mentally replace the "paid for by the Competitive Enterprise Institute" tag on the ads with, "paid for by the fossil fuel industry." I speculated in an April blog that the Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT (and other op-eds that appeared nationwide about the same time) were funded as part of an orchestrated public relations campaign by the fossil fuel industry. The appearance of the new TV ads are also likely part of the same PR campaign. The ads use language similar to the April op-ed pieces, using the word "alarmist" or its variations to describe those who warn that climate change presents a danger. The ads were timed to launch just before the opening of Al Gore's new film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth", due out today in New York City.

Quite a coincidence that the funders happen to be exactly those outfits for whom the truth of anthropogenic global warming is most inconvenient.

So what about the content?

Here is the full transcript of the narration for the second ad, titled "Glaciers":

You've seen those headlines about global warming. The glaciers are melting, we're doomed. That's what several studies supposedly found.

But other scientific studies found exactly the opposite. Greenland's glaciers are growing, not melting. The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner.

Did you see any big headlines about that? Why are they trying to scare us?

Global warming alarmists claim the glaciers are melting because of carbon dioxide from the fuels we use. Let's force people to cut back, they say. But we depend on those fuels, to grow our food, move our children, light up our lives.

And as for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

Masters takes a look at the studies the ads point to, and finds that the CEI interpretation to be dubious at best. The author of one of the two cited studies is more blunt:

In a University of Missouri press release issued May 19, Dr. Davis states:

"These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate. They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public."

Lies and damned lies are just about all the denialists have left.

Meanwhile a new study shows that global deserts are creeping northward with a change in the jet stream.

Deserts in the American Southwest and around the globe are creeping toward heavily populated areas as the jet streams shift, researchers reported Thursday.

The result: Areas already stressed by drought may get even drier.

Satellite measurements made from 1979 to 2005 show that the atmosphere in the subtropical regions both north and south of the equator is heating up. As the atmosphere warms, it bulges out at the altitudes where the northern and southern jet streams slip past like swift and massive rivers of air. That bulging has pushed both jet streams about 70 miles closer to the Earth's poles.

Since the jet streams mark the edge of the tropics, in essence framing the hot zone that hugs the equator, their outward movement has allowed the tropics to grow wider by about 140 miles. That means the relatively drier subtropics move as well, pushing closer to places like Salt Lake City, where Thomas Reichler, co-author of the new study, teaches meteorology.

"One of the immediate consequences one can think of is those deserts and dry areas are moving poleward," said Reichler, of the University of Utah. Details appear in Thursday's Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Is sure is getting dry here in New Mexico.