I just saw your comment re: Lewis and thought, “Heck, I got some links because I just responded to some sort of denial line from one of my friends a year or so ago.” I figured it’d been quite some time since you had said you caught the link between CEI/Lewis, but it was just so weird that I, just sitting here on my couch drinking beer, had already known that… not that I was privy to anything arcane, but I just sort of started and thought maybe I should post the links, just in case they are helpful to you. I am REALLY looking forward to your forthcoming post on Lewis/CEI/Carlin…

You have a very good site, and I’ve been enjoying all of your posts for the last several weeks. Keep up the good work!

And sorry I confused you with “Things Break”…

[DC: Well, that's a very good site too, as I recall.]

http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=338

A couple nice quotes and references there… my particular favorite is this:

“The main incontrovertible effect of global warming to date is that it has made those severely cold regions slightly less lethal to people and other living things.”

Source: http://www.cei.org/pdf/5288.pdf; 26 April, 2006

I’m guessing the polar bears are most grateful…

[DC: As a Sourcewatch contributor, that's also the first place I look, and the second is usually ExxonSecrets.org. As I've mentioned in another thread, I will be gathering background information for a future post on CEI's behind-the-scenes role in Carlin's Fox News interviews. I was unaware until now that Marlo Lewis was former executive director of CEI, so thanks for that.]

I just saw your statement concerning Marlo Lewis’ affiliation… I wish I’d seen it earlier. I’m sure by now you have done your research, but just in case, about a year ago, for some reason that I do not entirely recall at present, I looked into CEI/Lewis…

Sourcewatch.org, has a bit on Lewis under their Competitive Enterprise Institute page…

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute_And_Global_Warming

excerpt here, if I don’t get the link-pasting right, all that follows is from that page:

“CEI was also active in opposing the 1997 international global warming negotiations in Kyoto. CEI staff including Fred Smith, James Sheehan, Jonathan Adler and Marlo Lewis featured prominently in a list of “experts” provided to reporters by the industry-funded Global Climate Coalition. “The campaign against the 1997 Kyoto global warming treaty waged by right-wing think tanks has been another area where corporate America has heavily invested in right-wing policy groups that advance its interest” noted author David Callahan in 1999.”The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been a particularly aggressive advocate of the notion that global warming is a ‘theory not a fact.” [1]

CEI’s activism on global warming continued in 1998, with its executive director, Marlo Lewis, Jr., appearing before the Small Business Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to testify against proposed regulatory action that would have reduced the risk of climate change. “Where per capita energy consumption is high, per capita income is also high; and where per capita energy consumption is low, per capita income is also low. Thus, if we are to rescue mankind from the perils of poverty, we must dramatically increase global energy consumption. We must push down on the accelerator,” Lewis testified. “Inflating ‘Safety First!’ from a mere rule of thumb into a categorical imperative … is a recipe for paralysis and stagnation, perhaps the riskiest condition of all.”

–Okay now it is me again – the Sourcewatch article references the Callahan article as follows:

David Callahan, “The Think Tank as Flack,” Washington Monthly, Vol. 31, No. 11, November 1, 1999, p. 21. Historical overview and analysis of the rise of corporate-funded think tanks as PR vehicles for corporate interests.

[DC: Yes, you did - right from the beginning.]

Still am upset that you are snipping my homophobe libels. What’s the internet coming to.

[DC: I am saving you from yourself.]

A further point should be made as well. My understanding from reading various blogs like Climateaudit.org and John Christy’s congressional testimony, is that the “surface adjustment” is simply a division of the anomaly by a given factor. Since all of the years in the 2000s were at or above the baseline, the adjustment will tend to have a cooling bias in the critical recent period.

Certainly this adjustment should be examined more closely. Perhaps I’ll get around to that some time.

I think if you review the work on this honestly, all short term signals are amplified. You’ll also find the RSS version has a step which is out of norm for both the Radiosonde and the gisstemp datasets.

[DC: Yes, annual peaks and valleys are amplified. But medium-term and longer trends (e.g. 2000s average relative to 1990s average, or linear fit over 20 or 30 years) are dampened in UAH relative to surface. Furthermore, the "adjustment" mentioned is also unclear. Is it a baseline adjustment or something else?

Finally, the relative merits of RSS and UAH are not really germane here, although I am happy to discuss that at one of the threads I have done on the subject.]