Steve Milloy’s Ultimate Global Warming Challenge

LOL Steve Milloy

Steve “JunkScience” Milloy, who in addition to his Faux News paycheck, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the tobacco industry to assure Faux viewers that second-hand smoke is a myth and cancer links to cigarettes are overblown, has issued an Ultimate Global Warming Challenge. $125,000 will be awarded to the first person to disprove the hypotheses that human greenhouse emissions are not significantly warming the Earth’s surface while cooling the stratosphere and disprove that the benefits of global warming will equal or outweigh the costs of fighting it by the year 2100, “when all global social, economic and environmental effects are considered.”

I’m sure this challenge has nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands of dollars Exxon/Mobil “donates” to Milloy’s non-profit think tanks, but let’s play anyway. This should be pretty easy to win, all we have to do is reference the 928 Peer-Reviewed Articles published in Scientific Journals showing that Global Warming is happening and we are causing it, and then top it off with the 2007 IPCC Report on Climate Change. That cool $125k is as good as ours. Right?

Not so fast, please see the fine print. Specifically #5 in the rules:

5. All entries must represent the original work of an entrant that has been produced specifically for the UGWC.

Hmmm… Okay. So we can’t go to the thousands upon thousands of scientists, Nobel laureates, private citizens and their mountains of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory. We have to come up with something completely spontaneous and novel. Telling people they can’t stand upon the shoulders of giants isn’t good science, but let’s play. Everyday there’s a new story in the news about some new unanticipated effect of global warming, so we can make do. Right?

Hold on. Please see Rule #2:

2. Entrants acknowledge that the concepts and terms mentioned and referred to in the UGWC hypotheses are inherently and necessarily vague, and involve subjective judgment. JunkScience.com reserves the exclusive right to determine the meaning and application of such concepts and terms in order to facilitate the purpose of the contest.

So we’re dealing with very subjective criteria and a judging body (Steve Milloy), who will ultimately define that criteria supposedly at some later date, since he won’t set specifics now. Milloy is very busy accepting checks from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Faux News, so we can’t expect him to figure out those pesky details of his own unpublished hypotheses right away. That’s okay, because we all know Milloy is an honest and trustworthy soul who has no other agenda than defending us against those greedy environmentalists.

In fact, those treehugging econazis have so little evidence for their Global Warming hysteria that, as the JunkScience Website blares:

“The prize has gone unclaimed for 80 days!”

Knowing how much those Scientists love their money (It’s the only reason they go into the lucrative field of Academia.), the fact that not one has claimed the prize in three months proves the unsupportable character of their stance. Right?

Well… Not quite. See Rule #10:

10. The results of the UGWC will be announced on February 1, 2009.

So nobody’s won the prize in 80 days, but the prize won’t be awarded (if awarded at all, see Rule #4) for a whole ‘nother year. So by 02/01/2009, the JunkScience web page will be bragging:

“The prize has gone unclaimed for 540 days!”

Okay, so maybe Milloy isn’t the most trustworthy of people. Maybe he’s a bit of a snake oil salesman. That’s okay, because we’re going to take him on anyway! The contest website says:

“entries – we’ll post ’em when we get ’em!”

No entries? Well that’s about to change!

It took me awhile to figure out how to submit my entry. You see, Milloy’s site isn’t Section 508 Compliant, meaning it’s unnavigable to people with disabilities, lousy internet connections, and content filters (I fall into this last category when I’m at work).

So reviewing the submission instructions, we must first read the rules (check), then go the JunkScience gift shop and… um… buy something? Then we e-mail Milloy our entry in MSWord or PDF format and show him our receipt for our purchase.

To assure us all of this is 100 percent legitimate, Milloy will send us a free t-shirt making fun of us for believing in Anthropogenic Global Warming! Yay!!!

IN SUMMARY:

To have a chance to win Steve Milloy’s contest, you must disprove his twin, extremely nebulous hypotheses that people aren’t causing global warming and that global warming is a good thing. The money is coming out of Milloy’s pocket, he’s is the judge of all entries, and he doesn’t have to choose a winner.

You must reject the scientific virtue of building on your peers’ research for your submission, your submission may be manipulated and used for whatever propaganda Milloy sees fit, and you may not sue him.

When you enter the contest, you will be given a t-shirt letting everyone around you know what a dumbass you are, which raises the catch-22 of this contest: You’d have to be a puke-drooling nimrod stupider than a cup of dirt to enter the contest in the first place. In other words, stupider than Steve Milloy (and that’s lowwwwww), who will continue bragging about how there are still no winners for a contest that will not even be announcing winners until February 2009.

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge is ultimately a great big steaming pile of horse-patootey, and Steve Milloy isn’t so much a corporate “tool,” but more of a “Useful Idiot.” I wonder what that makes his audience?

Anyways, because of our concern for the intellectual climate in addition to the ecological climate, we truth-seeking empirically-minded scientific-method-adhering folks will continue to publish in peer-review journals, work with the legitimate media, and lobby the government in open forums, places where irrelevant dink-brains like Mr. Junkman are nowhere to be found.