For your consideration: JunkScience.com

Al Gore's constant compaigning and new movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, have helped to spread the issue of global warming to more and more people.

Recently, I received a message on my Yahoo! Fulbright forum about using his material to teach about global warming in English classes. Another person responded with the website JunkScience.com. Here's a little about Milloy, the author of that website:

"Steven J. Milloy is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. From the 1990s until the end of 2005, he was an adjunct scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. Milloy runs the website Junkscience.com, which is dedicated to debunking what he alleges to be false claims regarding global warming, DDT, environmental radicalism and scare science among other topics.[1] His other website, CSR Watch.com, is focused around attacking the corporate social responsibility movement. He is also head of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, a mutual fund he runs with tobacco executive Tom Borelli, who happens to be listed as the secretary of the Advancement of Sound Science Center, an organisation Milloy operates from his home in Potomac, Maryland .

In January 2006, Paul D. Thacker reported in The New Republic that Milloy has received thousands of dollars in payments from the Phillip Morris company since the early nineties, and that NGOs controlled by Milloy have received large payments from ExxonMobil [3]. Milloy has spent much of his life as a lobbyist for major corporations and trade organisations which have poisioning or polluting problems. He originally ran NEPI (National Environmental Policy Institute) which was founded by Republican Rep Don Ritter (who tried to get tobacco industry funding) using oil and gas industry funding. NEPI was dedicated to transforming both the EPA and the FDA, and challenging the cost of Superfund toxic cleanups by these large corporations. His funders have included: 3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lorillard Tobacco, Louisiana Chemical Association, National Pest Control Association, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris Companies, Procter & Gamble, Santa Fe Pacific Gold, and W.R. Grace, the asbestos and pesticide manufacturers."

Al Gore's work was thoughtful and well presented - it was also interesting, something I did not expect after seeing him in action in 2000. He did one thing that concerned me - he did not mention the threat of an ice age. Typically, the earth will readjust itself if it gets too warm by going into an ice age (of varying magnitudes) within a few decades. This happened around 1300AD(CE) or so, when the earth cooled very quickly after four centuries of warm weather. Weather patterns derived from ice cores showing geological history for thousands of years show this cycle. An ice age could be just as threatening to the world population as the out of control temperatures Gore is predicting. As of right now, the earth has not been as warm as it is now since the Romans controlled the Mediterranean.


You know it's warm when grapes and olives grow well in West Midlands, England.