Holy sh*t. That's some of the funniest stuff I've seen. Are you sure CEI did that? It's like one of those SNL commercials.

I'm reminded of those commercials in the RoboCop movies. You know the ones, where the advertiser isn't trying to be funny, but the movie audience knows better and they're laughing their collective a** off? Congratulations, folks, those days have arrived.

After I watched the first video, I thought, "Oh, man - that's funny."

But then, immediately, I thought, "Wait a minute, that's actually more scary than funny."

There are people who actually believe this. "Those fumes allow us to grow our food, transport our children, light up our life..." Wow. Just, wow. The inference that reducing our C02 output will place us squarely in the stone age is...astounding.

This is pretty disturbing! They are basically doing what they accuse environmentalists of doing : trying to scare the general population. Except that they say that reducing CO2 will keep them from having lights on the streets, keep them from bringing their your children to soccer practice and force them to use a bicycle during an ice storm!

I guess for people who are fortunate to know more about this issue, it's funny. But for the general population, a majority who haven't got a clue about GHGs, it's just mean.

Apparently, they live in a parallel universe where everything is the opposite of what it is here on Earth (and spock has a beard):

"Keep burning lots of fossil fuels, or bad things will happen!"

I can't believe that they're seriously airing these. Exxon Mobil, I mean, CEI's strategy of pretending a problem doesn't exist will still suit many Americans, sadly.

Wait... so... if I stop driving my SUV (alone) 80km/day from the burbs and back, I will be reducing "life"???

Those are insane. Are they actually being aired on Television?

It's like something out of Thank You for Smoking.

They're just giving the "Green" community a taste of our own medicine. I mean "Climate Crisis", I agree its a problem and we NEED to do something about it, but emotive words like crisis do nothing to educate.

Maybe I'm giving the public at large more credit than we deserve, but people are not stupid, regardless of how we act sometimes.

I'd like to take the producers of advertising like this and benevolently whack em' like baby seals, but letting emotions rule is how we ended up with W as a president and untold numbers of fellow human beings dead in Iraq.

Live with your brain, not with your heart and the Ws of the world will fade away.

If anything, I think that we're not being clear enough on the dangers of global warming, and it *is* a crisis ("A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point."). It's not a matter of brain or heart, lots of people have explained the situation from a scientific and from a moral point of view; it's because it's not a "sexy" story to report, it's because it's going on in slow motion relatively to our human lives, it's because there's too much profit to be made by ignoring it..

People are still more concerned with small stuff like taxes and immigration while the future of the human race is in grave danger. It's not a matter of choice, it won't go away if we ignore it.. It should be all over the mainstream.

WOW.

Is that the best they can do?

I would love for someone to come along and tell us that there there really isn't a problem, and that we really have no effect on the world around us.

And it ain't these guys.

Scary. Very scary. Think CEI's motto will catch on with the pro-life lobby? "Outlawing abortion: They call it dangerous, back-alley procedures. We call it life."

Some Treehuggers we are. Send that $100 tax relief right away, Senator Frist! If we don't buy some more gasoline right quick, trees will die!

RealClimate has a few words:
RealClimate

The two Science articles that one of the commercials cite do not really help their message. The RealClimate link given above by Sam describes the articles pretty well. They basically say that the interior of Antarctica and Greenland are gaining in elevation "due to increased precipitation in a global warming climate." That's not to say anything about the edges which are shrinking or the total mass balance. In any case, the article about Antarctica claims the gains are only enough to "slow sealevel rise [of 1.8 mm/year] by 0.12 mm/year."

Overall the aricles are an acknowlegdement of global climate change and the increase of greenhouse gases, not studies that refute the serious consequences to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Those commercials made me think of sewage: It comes from humans (yea!), and it's used by plants (yea!), but when it gets piled high and deep, the whole situation stinks.
(Not to mention the B.S. aura the commercials themselves gave off!)

Did anyone read their FAQ section, which said (note the part about DDT...),
"The charge that global warming is worse than terrorism in terms of damage to the world is hyperbole. The implausible and unsubstantiable claim of many deaths each year—the figure is often put at 150,000—owing to global warming ignores the fact that most of those alleged deaths are due to diseases such as malaria, which have historically existed even in cold climates and could easily be controlled if the environmental lobby dropped its opposition to the use of DDT.[25] Moreover, that number is itself dwarfed by the number killed by poverty, which will be increased if the world decides to suppress the use of energy."
This whole site HAS to be a parody. Somebody PLEASE tell me it's a parody!

Oh. My. God! These are not real are they?

How does the narrator sleep at night? She must cry herself to sleep.

The first article shown from the second video reads. "Snowfall driven growth in East antarctic ice sheet mitigates recent sea level rise. Sattelite radar altimetry measurements indicate that the east antarctic ice sheet interior north of 81.6 Degrees S. increased by a mass of 45 -+ 7 billion metric tons per year from 1992-2003. Comparisons with contemperaneous meteoroloical model snowfall estimates suggest that the gain in mass was associated with increased precipitation. A gain of this magnitude is enough to slow sea level rise by 0.12 +- 0.002 milimeters per year."

The narrator also says that "as for carbon dioxide isnt smog or smoke, it's what we breath out, and what plants breath in."

I cant belive Exxon Mobile is trying to place this propoganda on us. : (

I posted a counter ad (you are right - it is parody proof) to the CEI spots: :::[Carbon Dioxide spot - they call it ad, we call it a lie].

I've posted a full commentary about these ads and the internet frenzy surrounding them at greenr.

If you look at it, there have been 4 cycles of cooling in warming of +/-5 degrees C over the past 450,000 years, and I'm betting there weren't CO2 humans to blame back then, so why should they be to blame now?

We are in the MIDDLE of a warming cycle, that still has +5 degrees C to go. Of course we are seeing global warming.

See my site for the full details.

nick maybe u can do soem better science there? we've had 20 ice ages in the past 2 million years. what does the last 450,000 have to do with it?

also two smallissues, if you look closely you will find ample proxydata that shows how our CO2 level has spiked before, specifically at the end of each interglacial era. think about that, it has to get warmer to start a cooling trend (and if you look at the 11 Billion Tonnes of Ice dumped inland on greenland lastyear, you can see how increased percipitation, a lowering albedo from missing sea ice and a host of other factors play into the beginning of a glacioal cycle, not as you state on yoru site another 5,000 years of warming.

and lastly, in previous integlacial cycles, after 10,000 years of erosion and leeching the biosphere is weak and everything that grows on it weakens, and before homo spaien spaien showed up, most of that was covered in forests. Well when those forest are weak and sick and their rootmass not growing as quickly (not holding water)you get a real succesptability for forest fires, and with no planes to dump water and no fire fighting teams cutting firewalls, guess what you get? A whole lot of CO2 going up in to the atmosphere, which of course heats up, evaporates more water at the equator, and makes percipitation at the poles a possibility (cause for most of our warm period, they've been deserts. really cold deserts).

just because we are doing the CO2 atmodumping this time doesnt mean that it hasn't happened before. and just because its the norm doesnt mean that there's nothing we can do about it. but obfuscating further doesnt help.

i like how they call themselves a non-profit organization when they are clearly a lobbying front that thrives on huge handouts from mega-corporations that refuse to regulate their own consumption. the president of CEI probably makesthe same amount of money as any other CEO.
Imagine how big of a tool the guy is who's job it is to help destroy the environment... i sometimes wonder those people would sleep at night if it weren't for all the morphine that Merck sends them in the mail.

Oh dear - my boyfriend and I just watched these together and they are so very pathetic. The problem is that if they air them on big channels, some folks are actually going to believe them.

theres no such thing as global warming RETARDS get a life or a brain at least

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Comment from the editor: We kept this comment for its comedic value.

Hello Tree Huggers, this is my first post or time to find your site. I thought you may have some interest or comments on some information I recently stumbled into. We have a very conservative newspaper columnist in my hometown who bombards us with "the word" each week.

He recently wrote an article (his articles are published in Yonkers Tribune and my local paper The News Connection) on global warming:
http://www.thenewsconnection.com/weir_brainwashed.htm

I wrote an initial response to that article on the original Yonkers copy of the editorial and followed up here:

http://www.yonkerstribune.tv/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1386&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

What do you think of this???

Here is the full text and description for you to forward to everyone you know. (this ad makes me want to emulate the environmental aspect of the Amish lifestyle and drop off the grid.)

We hear soft, peaceful music. Open to a city park full of people, a beautiful woman blowing bubbles, children skipping rope, then...
"Theres something in these pictures you can't see."
"It's essential to life."
"we breath it out."
"Plants breath it in."
"It come from animal life, the oceans, the earth, and the fuels we find in it."
"It's called Carbon Dioxide, CO2."
"The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a world of back breaking labor."
"Lighting up our lives."
"Allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love."
Insert ominous music score. (imagine Darth Vader track in Star Wars)
"Now, some politicians want to label Carbon Dioxide a pollutant."
"Imagine if they succeed."
"What would our lives be like then?"

"Carbon Dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life."
(Ends with a girl blowing on Dandelion and the following text appears:)
Competitive Enterprise Institute
www.cei.org
Below is a link to the actual TV commercial:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5425355

This is what happens when stupid people get money! i mean really no body intelligent would ever make a commercial like that. And what angers me is, many people will believe this because this is exactly what they want to believe, it is human nature to try to avoid problems and this is the perfect thing for people who just are too ignorant to recognize we have a real problem here.

I remember about 20 years ago being taught that Global Cooling was the Big Bad wolf. Even had an article in Newsweek outlining how it was happening. All the things scientist now say causes Global warming was also being blamed for global cooling. What if just maybe they were right back in the 70's and the earth is really going thru a cooling period and we're actually midigating the damages? Seems like scientists are always wrong in the past but always correct in the present.

Well, that was awfully circumlocutious. Lemme see if I can simplify it, for less highbrow viewers:

GODDAMN NAZI COMMIE LIBERAL TERRISTS WANNA OUTLAW BREATHING

Yeah, I think that just about sums it up.