(from Fact Check)
Summary
The business-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released two ads last week to “counter global warming alarmism.”
One of the ads says research shows “The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner. . . Why are they trying to scare us?” Actually, scientists say increased snowfall in Antarctica’s interior is evidence that global warming is taking place. Scientists also say that the ice sheet is melting at the ocean’s edge and a recent report says it is shrinking overall.
The ads drew a protest from a University of Missouri professor who says they are “a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate.” He said one of them misuses a study he published in Science magazine last year on the Antarctic ice sheet. An editor of Science also said the ads misrepresent the findings of that study as well as a second study on Greenland’s glaciers.
The second CEI ad notes that carbon dioxide (CO2) is “essential to life,” and says, “they call it pollution. We call it life.” That ad fails to mention that too much CO2 can cause global temperatures to rise or that there is more of it in the atmosphere than any time during the last 420,000 years.
CEI, which gets just over 9 per cent of its budget from Exxon Mobil Corporation, said it was only trying to make sure the public hears “both sides of the story.”
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Wanna know who is CEI’s biggest financier?
Exxon.
Learn more about CEI here.