U.S. Chamber of Commerce Speaker

Trading on His Fraudulent Book Title

Self-described "environmentalist" Lawrence Solomon has become the toast of the oil-industry-backed climate change denier community ever since the spring 2008 release of his book, The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so).

The problem, then and still, is that nobody in Solomon's overheated text actually denies that humans are causing climate change. He admits as much on Page 45 of his book, saying:

"As these rather dramatic reversals for the doomsday view mounted, however, I also noticed something striking about my growing cast of deniers.

"None of them were deniers."

That's a little point that Solomon never seems to mention on the speaker circuit. At least, in the radio and television interviews I've heard - and in his endless series of quibbling trivia that he has written in the Canadian business flyer the National Post - he never seems to say something forthrightly honest like: "none of the people in my book are deniers, really. They just argue about tiny bits of science that even the IPCC admits remain unsettled."

Neither does Solomon acknowledge the complaints that he has received (and rebuffed) from legitimate scientists whose work he has misrepresented.

He just sits, smiling for the camera, while someone introduces him as the author of a whole book and series on scientists who deny climate change - as if that were actually true.

Solomon's next public "appearance" as a denier expert comes in an open conference call scheduled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008 at 10 a.m. (presumably that's Inside-the-Beltway Standard Time).

Turn on, tune in and don't hold your breath waiting for Larry Solomon to acknowledge what he so surprisingly admitted in his own text: that his book title, which implies fraud, is actually an example of fraud, and one that's working out very well for this suddenly more-famous author.

PS: Getting Judged by the Company You Keep

Regarding the photo of Lawrence Solomon at a "CEI" lectern, it's interesting to note that the Competitive Enterprise Institute is so discredited on the issue of climate change that Exxon Mobil agreed to stop giving them money.