One-sided statements

• AIT never acknowledges the indispensable role of fossil fuels in alleviating hunger and poverty, extending human life spans, and democratizing consumer goods, literacy, leisure, and personal mobility.

• It never acknowledges the environmental, health, and economic benefits of climatic warmth and the ongoing rise in the air's CO 2 content.

• It neglects to mention that aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events declined dramatically during the 20 th century.

• It neglects to mention the circumstances that make it reasonable rather than blameworthy for America to be the biggest CO 2 emitter: the world's largest economy, abundant fossil energy resources, markets integrated across continental distances, the world's most mobile population.

• The book impugns the motives of so-called global warming skeptics but never acknowledges the special-interest motivations of those whose research grants, direct mail income, industrial policy privileges, regulatory power, prosecutorial plunder, or political careers depend on keeping the public in a state of fear about global warming.

• AIT never addresses the obvious criticism that the Kyoto Protocol is all economic pain for no environmental gain and that regulations stringent enough to measurably cool the planet would be a “cure” worse than the alleged disease.

Misleading statements

• AIT implies that, throughout the past 650,000 years, changes in CO 2 levels preceded and largely caused changes in global temperature, whereas the causality mostly runs the other way: CO 2 changes followed global temperature changes by hundreds to thousands of years.

• It ignores the societal factors that typically overwhelm climatic factors in determining people's risk of damage or death from hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires, and disease.

• It implies that a study, which found that none of 928 science articles (actually abstracts) denied a CO 2 -global warming link, shows that Gore's apocalyptic view of global warming is the “consensus” view among scientists.

• It reports that 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused Bush of distorting science, without mentioning that the scientists acted as members of a 527 political group set up to promote the Kerry for President Campaign.

Exaggerated statements

• AIT hypes the importance and exaggerates the certainty of the alleged link between global warming and the frequency and severity of tropical storms.

• Claims polar bears “have been drowning in significant numbers,” based on a report that found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year, following an abrupt storm.

• Portrays the collapse in 2002 of the Larson-B ice shelf—a formation the “size of Rhode Island”—as harbinger of doom. For perspective, the Larson-B was 180 th the size of Texas and 1/246 th the size of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

• AIT presents a graph suggesting that China's new fuel economy standards are almost 30% more stringent than the current U.S. standards. In fact, the Chinese standards are only about 5% more stringent.

Speculative statements

• AIT blames global warming for the record-breaking 37-inch downpour in Mumbai, India, in July 2005, even there has been no trend in Mumbai rainfall for the month of July in 45 years.

• It blames global warming for recent floods in China's Sichuan and Shandong provinces, even though more damaging floods struck those areas in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries.

• It blames global warming for the disappearance of Lake Chad, a disaster more likely stemming from a combination of regional climate variability and societal factors such as population increase and overgrazing.

• AIT warns that a doubling of pre-industrial CO 2 levels to 560 ppm will so acidify seawater that all optimal areas for coral reef construction will disappear by 2050—implausible because coral calcification rates have increased as ocean temperatures and CO 2 levels have risen, and today's main reef builders evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO 2 levels hovered above 1,000 ppm for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 ppm for several million years.

• It warns of “significant and alarming structural changes” in the submarine base of the WAIS, but does not tell us what those changes are or why they are “significant and alarming.” The WAIS has been retreating since the early Holocene. At the rate of retreat observed in the 1990s, the WAIS should disappear in about 7,000 years.

• It warns that half the Greenland Ice Sheet could “slide” into the sea, even though the ice sheet sits in a bowl-like depression surrounded by mountains that restrict glacial outflow to the sea.

Wrong statements

• AIT claims glaciologist Lonnie Thompson's reconstruction of climate history proves the Medieval Warm Period was “tiny” compared to the warming observed in recent decades. It doesn't. Four of Thompson's six ice cores indicate the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as or warmer than any recent decade.

• It claims the rate of global warming is accelerating, when it has been remarkably constant for the past 30 years—roughly 0.17°C/decade.

• It attributes Europe's killer heat wave of 2003 to global warming; it was actually due to an atmospheric circulation anomaly.

• It claims that 2004 set an all-time record for the number of tornadoes in the United States. Tornado frequency has not increased; rather, the detection of smaller tornadoes has increased. If we consider the tornadoes that have been detectable for many decades (F-3 or greater), there is actually a downward trend since 1950.

• It blames global warming for a “mass extinction crisis” that is not, in fact, occurring.

Originally posted by vox2442
A skeptic`s guide to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the source of the above information, can be found here:

www.sourcewatch.org...

Oh lordy lordy, I have slipped into another universe and can't get out. I never thought I would ever agree with Edsinger and Muaddib, never mind in the same thread Now I could be wrong about this but it is my understanding the Earth has only had polar icecaps for 20% of the planets life. So the other 80% of the time there weren't any, so isn't the planet just doing what is natural. I also want to say that I think we are abusing our environment but not the way the "Evironuts" as ed would say have us believe. Was it only about 20 years ago we where being warned about a coming ice age? guess that scam/scare wore off. These people needed a new scam, now where going to melt for the next 20.

Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics

Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research
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Once Believers, Now Skeptics ( Link to pdf version )

Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre,
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So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest environmental credentials.

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Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997.
Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.”
A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.” Wiskel now says “the truth has to start somewhere.”

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Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the C02 temperature link is only “incriminating circumstantial evidence.”

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Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”

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Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006. “I switched to the other side in the early 1990's when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained. Murty was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

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Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears "poppycock."

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And the list goes on.
U.S. Seante Commity on Environment & Public Works