“Oops, I did it again. I think I did it again.”
Lyrics to a Britney Spears song? Yes. But it’s also likely they represent some of the casual thoughts rambling through Al Gore’s mind at this week’s Copenhagen summit.
On Monday, Gore had a worldwide stage to enlighten mankind about the latest global warming science. He told conference attendees that he had just received “fresh” data showing there was a 75 per cent chance that the Arctic ice cap would disappear by the summer of 2014 and that the melting of polar and Himalayan ice would deprive more than a billion people of access to clean water.
But the scientist quoted by Gore didn’t appreciate the reference. Dr. Wieslav Maslowski said he had no idea how Gore arrived at this figure and “I would never try to estimate . . . anything as exact as this.”
Oops. An exaggeration. Al Gore did it again.
Gore’s exaggeration does nothing to help the credibility of his friends at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who are already on the defensive. The recent publication of e-mails between those connected with the IPCC and/or IPCC data suggests scientists may have deliberately falsified and suppressed data in a deceitful effort to make the science fit the ideology of global warming.
Outside of the scientific realm, much of the real argument over global warming isn’t over temperature change so much as what factors may have caused it—man-made or natural. Ironically, these e-mails now provide sufficient reason for all to question whether global warming even exists and, more specifically, why Canada should be handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to fight a problem that might not exist.
Yet, in a telling comment about his interest in scientific accuracy, Gore claims that concerns rising from these e-mails are “arcane points.” Arcane? Like when Gore told Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien that “the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees.” This arcane point was later clarified by scientists to be about 5,000 Celsius. Oops, he did it again.
Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar for best documentary from his Hollywood friends but, in England, it only won a date with the British High Court. The plan was to show it to schools across Britain and Wales, but objections to its apocalyptic claims ( “humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb”) led to an unusual court case where the science underlying Gore’s claims was on trial. In the end, the film was declared a political work that promoted only one side of the argument. Teachers were then legally required to make this and nine scientific inaccuracies clear to children when showing it.
The nine errors included Gore’s “distinctly alarmist” exaggeration that the melting of ice on Greenland “in the near future” would cause sea levels to rise up to six metres. Wrong. The real science shows that if the ice were to melt, it would do so . . . over millenniums.
The plight of polar bears drowning while swimming to find rapidly disappearing ice floes made big media waves in 2006, but the judge found only one scientific study relating to the claim and it showed “four bears recently drowned because of a storm.” Claims that melting snow on Mount Kilimanjaro was evidence of global warming? The judge found no evidence of this. Oops, he did it again. And again.
In light of what we now know about Gore’s history of exaggerating and concocting scientific claims, it’s rather ironic that the citation for his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize notes Gore’s effort to “disseminate greater knowledge.” Perhaps it should read “disinformation.”
One gaffe means nothing. But a consistent pattern of stretching/creating “truth” suggests there is a deliberate agenda at work. In November, it was noted that Gore is on course to become the first to make a billion dollars from the climate change industry. Gee, what could that agenda possibly be?
- Defender to defendant - Saturday January 29, 2011 at 9:16 am
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- Forget blame game - Saturday January 15, 2011 at 7:48 am
