Ads Claim to Counter “Lopsided Press Coverage”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute defended the ads and dismissed scientist Curt Davis' claim that the ads misrepresented his research.
Myron Ebell, CEI's director of global warming policy, agrees the public is being misled, but he blames it on “global warming alarmism” and “lopsided press coverage of glacial melting as a worldwide catastrophe.” Ebell says the media chooses to report only the research that supports the evidence of climate change and ignores scientific studies that question it.
"There is no consensus about the extent of the warming or the consequences," Ebell said.
But Ebell’s comments read like just one more CEI attempt to spin fact out of fiction. In reality, any “lopsided press coverage” that occurs on global warming is largely driven by groups such as CEI, which deliberately seek to confuse the issue with misleading and inaccurate information.
Public Confused by Misleading Information
A survey by Science magazine (December 2004) of peer-reviewed scientific studies on climate change showed that 928 peer-reviewed papers supported global warming and none denied it.
In a similar sampling of stories from the mass media, 53 percent suggested that global warming is unproven, a perception driven largely by reporters including in their coverage misleading claims by groups such as CEI.
Clearly, the message people are getting doesn’t match the facts—but not in the way CEI suggests.
