“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing.
To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”
- Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, op-ed in the June , 00 Wall Street Journal.
Nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science.
Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also
serve to intimidate the public and even scientists -- especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a
bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt
to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce -- if we're lucky.
What follows is a very brief summary of the science that the former Vice President promotes in either a wrong or misleading way:
• He promoted the now debunked “hockey stick” temperature chart in an attempt to prove man’s overwhelming impact on the climate
•He attempted to minimize the significance of Medieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age
•He insisted on a link between increased hurricane activity and global warming that most sciences believe does not exist.
•He asserted that today’s Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth while ignoring that
temperatures in the 1930’s were as warm or warmer
•He claimed the Antarctic was warming and losing ice but failed to note, that is only true of a small region and
the vast bulk has been cooling and gaining ice.
•He hyped unfounded fears that Greenland’s ice is in danger of disappearing
•He erroneously claimed that ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro is disappearing due to global warming, even while the region cools and researchers blame the ice loss on local land-use practices
•He made assertions of massive future sea level rise that is way out side of any supposed scientific “consensus” and is not supported in even the most alarmist literature.
•He incorrectly implied that a Peruvian glacier’s retreat is due to global warming, while ignoring the fact that the region has been cooling since the 1930s and other glaciers in South America are advancing
•He blamed global warming for water loss in Africa’s Lake Chad, despite NASA scientists concluding that local population and grazing factors are the more likely culprits
•He inaccurately claimed polar bears are drowning in significant numbers due to melting ice when in fact they are thriving
•He completely failed to inform viewers that the 48 scientists who accused President Bush of distorting science
were part of a political advocacy group set up to support Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004
60 Scientists Debunk Global Warming Fears
Earlier this year, a group of prominent scientists came forward to question the so-called “consensus” that the Earth faces a “climate emergency.” On April 6, 2006, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister asserting that the science is deteriorating from underneath global warming alarmists.
“Observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future…Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary,” the 60 scientists wrote.
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“It was only 30 years ago that many of today’s global-warming alarmists were telling us that the world was in the midst of a global-cooling catastrophe. But the science continued to evolve, and still does, even though so many choose to ignore it when it does not fit with predetermined political agendas,” the 60 scientists concluded.