Perhaps you've seen the Competitive Enterprise Institute's global-warming-agnostic ads. You know, the ones that feature smiling children and happy flowers and the tagline "Carbon Dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life." (Of course! Carbon dioxide = life! That's why, when you put a plastic bag over your head, you live!) Well, if you haven't seen the spots, hurry up and check them out before the CEI wises up to their unintentional comedy and pulls them.
Not only are the ads a textbook example of thin thinking and shoddy logic, they also - gasp! - misrepresent scientific research to make their pro-emission case.
Hoping to keep the myth of climate-change controversy [1] alive, one ad, entitled "Glaciers," cites a couple of scientific papers allegedly finding that "Greenland's glaciers are growing, not melting" and "the Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner." Scientists! Controversy! The Debate Continues! [2]
Except that one of those papers' lead authors is calling it B.S. [3] In a press release, Curt Davis, an author of the cited Antarctic study, [4] said, "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming [4] 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." (Davis is an engineering professor and the director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia.) An industry-supported [5] think tank [6] misleading [7] the public? [8] Say it isn't so!
It is so. For more evidence, we turn to the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby, [9] who came up with this little counter [10] to the ad's Greenland claim:
"[T]he most authoritative and up-to-date statement on climate science is contained in a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is circulating in draft form. According to scientists who have seen it, Chapter Four says: 'Taken together, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking.' As to the possibility that the melting of some ice caps is offset by the growth of others, the draft also says: 'Thickening in central regions of Greenland is more than offset by increased melting near the coast.'"
[Photo credit: National Oceaninc & Atmospheric Administration [11]]
[And mad props to this poster [12] at RealClimate [13] for the plastic bag joke.]