ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as "irrelevant conclusion". [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]

In her comment to our Exxon post, Beth Wellington raises an important question: What can we do to make sure that our kids are being taught the real facts on climate change? Her question reminded me of a recent incident, and leads me to award this week’s Ignoratio Elenchi Award to an unknown teacher from an unspecified state. Let me explain.

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Guest blogger Jim Marston is an attorney, and the Director of the Energy Program in the Texas Office of Environmental Defense.

Who would have thought that, almost a month to the day after the USCAP initiative was announced, coal-enamored TXU would come on board? But today's big news is victory in Texas, thanks to an unusual buyout agreement.

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Glaciers in Andes mountains
frozen for 5000 years
now melting.

What a difference nine years makes!

For more than a decade, Exxon has been a major player in a campaign to spread doubt about global warming. We know this for a fact because a 1998 internal Exxon memo titled "Global Climate Science Communications: Action Plan" was leaked to the press. The stated goal of the plan, whose authors include Randy Randol of Exxon Corp, Sharon Kneiss of Chevron Corp, and Joseph Walker of the American Petroleum Institute, was to change the American public's view that global warming was a threat so that policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions could be stopped. The memo laid out a wide range of strategies and tactics to achieve this goal, budgeting nearly $6 million plus the cost of advertising.

But suddenly Exxon has changed its tune.

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ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as "irrelevant conclusion". [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]

On Monday, an article appeared in the Washington Times that offers so many outrageous examples of the logical fallacy of irrelevant conclusion (formally, ignoratio elenchi) that I'm beginning a new series of posts - the Ignoratio Elenchi Awards - for the most flagrantly misleading arguments against curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Tons of CO₂ pollution. We are always hearing about how many tons of CO₂ pollution we emit. The average American car emits about seven tons of CO₂ in a year; the average American family, about 24 tons; the United States as a whole, over seven billion tons; and worldwide, almost 30 billion tons. The Virgin Earth Challenge (see last week's post) offers $25 million to whoever can economically remove one billion tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year.

But what is a ton of CO₂?

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This post is dedicated to the two great Americans we will honor on Presidents’ Day this Monday.

Everybody knows about Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address; they are a big part of why Lincoln's birthday is honored. Most people don't know that Lincoln also established the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

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Everybody's always talking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What you don't hear so often is a suggestion to clean up what's already there. How would you do that? Good question! And it's the question that Virgin Earth Challenge is posing to the world. Come up with a commercially viable way to remove a billion tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere per year, and win $25 million.

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Newsweek is running an article by George Will titled "Inconvenient Kyoto Truths". Will says, "It is time to call some bluffs … President Bush should give the world something amusing to watch. He should demand that the Senate vote on the [Kyoto] protocol." He then goes on to say that America is not disproportionately responsible for global warming, that global warming isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, that we don’t know how to stop it anyway, and that any efforts to do so could cost "tens of trillions". And for all these reasons, he says, the Kyoto protocol was correctly rejected by the U.S.

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In my post last Friday, I mentioned "cap-and-trade" as a good strategy to control greenhouse gas emissions. If you'd like to learn more about cap-and-trade, take a look at a post I wrote for the Gristmill Blog. It describes what cap-and-trade is, and why it's a more effective strategy than a federal "carbon tax".