Al Gore - An inconvenient Boob

[MTBME]

Like I said, this guy is no expert.

"The June 27, 2006 Associated Press (AP) article titled “Scientists OK Gore’s Movie for Accuracy” by Seth Borenstein raises some serious questions about AP’s bias and methodology. AP chose to ignore the scores of scientists who have harshly criticized the science presented in former Vice President Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”"

Here is a sampling of the views of some of the scientific critics of Gore:

Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, on Gore’s film:

"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

"The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." – Bob Carter as quoted in the Canadian Free Press, June 12, 2006

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, wrote:

“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.” - Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal

Gore’s film also cites a review of scientific literature by the journal Science which claimed 100% consensus on global warming, but Lindzen pointed out the study was flat out incorrect.

“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”- Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal.

Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, wrote an open letter to Gore criticizing his presentation of climate science in the film:

“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?”- Roy Spencer wrote in a May 25, 2006 column.

Former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball reacted to Gore’s claim that there has been a sharp drop-off in the thickness of the Arctic ice cap since 1970.

"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology,” –Tim Ball said, according to the Canadian Free Press.




http://www.epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257909

[Slider]

These guys are still WAAAY in the minority. What, exactly, makes them smarter than nearly everyone else involved?

By nearly everyone, I mean the official positions of the major players, like the National Science Foundation, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA, etc.

All Al Gore's movie does is present the research of others. Peer-reviewed, and subject to all the other processes that separate real science from junk science.

As for Arctic ice cap melting: Read the effing news, fer chrissake. Whole villages are sinking in mud. Dylan: You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

In case you missed it, Lindzen is on the oil companies payroll.

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[Longshanks]

I'm no big fan of Al Gore, but in the movie he doesn't claim to be an expert, and he doesn't claim that weather isn't cyclical.

“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic;"

Untrue. I wonder if that person even saw the movie? What I got out of the movie is that, if we are at a time when global warming would naturally be occurring, which we appear to be, then the extra (man-made) CO2 in the atmosphere is going to greatly accelerate the process. And thus make it more catastrophic than if it had been the result of a natural warming process. Another point he made is that we reversed the ozone problem, so why not tackle this one?

He's either right or he's wrong, and we'll know in our lifetime, possibly a lot sooner. If he's wrong, great! If he's right, and the stronger hurricanes and endless rains are a sign of what's to come, then people like you still won't give him credit. So he loses either way.

[lee]

Agree with Longshanks here... who cares if he's right or wrong... if he's right, we're in for a whole lot of hurt, especially with the rapid industrialization of the world, and the general inability and desire to try and conserve energy... i sure do hope that global warming is all a big hoax that highly educated scientists are pulling on us all, but i highly doubt that...

also, is there really a problem with trying to reduce pollution, this is an issue i can't come to terms with anyone you disbelieves global warming.. we know that pollution is bad, why ignore that. is there really a need for people to drive huge, gas guzzling vehicles? we are just set in our ways and its to inconvenient to change, we're lazy.

[Mr_Cheeze]

Like I said, this guy is no expert.

.....



So you give no credence whatsoever to his basic premise that it is within our reach to at least try and reduce the amount of pollutants and artificially produced CO2 for the sake of our planet's health? Or are you another one of these people who just likes to dispute anything Al Gore or any other environmentalist who happens to be Democrat or leftist has to say out of mere partisan bias?

[catbbq]

These guys are still WAAAY in the minority. What, exactly, makes them smarter than nearly everyone else involved?


Why does it matter if they are in the minority? Since when did science become a democracy?



As for Arctic ice cap melting: Read the effing news, fer chrissake. Whole villages are sinking in mud.



Which peer reviewed news article are you refering to?

[Slider]

Why does it matter if they are in the minority? Since when did science become a democracy?


Peer review pretty much is a democratic process. It is a way of weeding out whackos, kinda like the voting process, but more structured.


As for Arctic ice cap melting: Read the effing news, fer chrissake. Whole villages are sinking in mud.



Which peer reviewed news article are you refering to?


You need peer reviews to qualify a first hand eye witness report? Anyway, I Googled "arctic village sinking" and selected the least inflammatory version, from The Washington Post.

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------------------------------------------------
Inuit See Signs In Arctic Thaw
String of Warm Winters Alarms 'Sentries for the Rest of the World'

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; A01



PANGNIRTUNG, Canada -- Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.

Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.

The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.

The Inuit -- with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia -- saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear.

In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos."

In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. "It's getting very strange up here," he said. "There's more warm air, more massive and more uniform."

Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News.

In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees.

"We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it," said one resident, Donald Mearns.

"These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned," said Enosik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of male elders in this Inuit village. "We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns or the wind, or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed."

The Inuit alarms, once passed off as odd stories, are earning confirmation from science. Canada's federal weather service said this month that the country had experienced its warmest winter since measurements began in 1948. Nationwide, average temperatures this winter were 7 degrees above normal. Some of the larger temperature increases were in the arctic north.

"That is entirely consistent with the long-range forecasts that indicate the effects of global warming will be most felt in the north," said Douglas Bancroft, director of Oceanography and Climate Science for Canada's federal fisheries department.

"What we see is very clear. We are going to see a reduction in the overall arctic ice. It doesn't mean it goes away. But it brings profound changes," he said by telephone from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. "Weather will get stormier because the more open water you have, the easier it is for storms to brew up."

Bancroft said there would also be significant changes in the region's ecosystems.

"You have species that adapted over 40,000 years to a certain regime," he said. "Some will make it, and some won't."

Satellites at NASA have measured a meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the past decade. With other NASA data, scientists in Boulder, Colo., say the retreat of the ice caps in 2006 may be as large as last year's, which they say was likely the biggest in a century. Earth's average surface temperatures last year tied those of 1998, the highest in more than a century, NASA says.

In this month's issue of the journal Science, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers said the Bering Sea was warming so much it was experiencing "a change from arctic to subarctic conditions." Gray whales are heading north and walruses are starving, adrift on ice floes in water too deep for feeding. Warmer-water fish such as pollock and salmon are coming in, the researchers reported.

Off the coast of Nova Scotia, ice on Northumberland Strait was so thin and unstable this winter that thousands of gray seals crawled on unaccustomed islands to give birth. Storms and high tides washed 1,500 newborn seal pups out to sea, said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal expert for the federal fisheries department in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

"We are seeing dramatic changes in the weather systems," Conway said. "To be honest, we don't really understand what are the potential impacts. If you look back in history, there have been warming periods that have gotten back to normal. But we don't know if that will happen this time."

Metuq, the hunter, fears the worst. "The world is slowly disintegrating," he said, inside his heated house in Pangnirtung, a community of 1,200 perched on a dramatic union of mountain and fjord on Baffin Island. Seal skins stretched on canvas dried outside his home. The town remained treacherous. Rain in February had frozen solid, and there had been almost no snow to cover it.

"They call it climate change," he said. "But we just call it breaking up."

The troubles for the Inuit are ominous for everyone, says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, head of the International Circumpolar Conference, an organization for the 155,000 Inuit worldwide.

"People have become disconnected from their environment. But the Inuit have remained through this whole dilemma, remained extremely connected to its environment and wildlife," she said. "They are the early warning. They see what's happening to the planet, and give the message to the rest of the world."

[off piste]

Well, sounds like good times are coming for the robins, barn owls and hornets.

[MTBME]

"So you give no credence whatsoever to his basic premise that it is within our reach to at least try and reduce the amount of pollutants and artificially produced CO2 for the sake of our planet's health?"

No. Where are you coming up with that? I have no problem with that at all. I say lets crank up a few more nuclear reactors, lower our dependency on oil, foreign or not. Utilize a little wind, solar here and there and start using alternative fuel sources.

"Or are you another one of these people who just likes to dispute anything Al Gore or any other environmentalist who happens to be Democrat or leftist has to say out of mere partisan bias?"

Not at all. It appears Gore left out certain issues that didn't fit his bias and may have exagerated others. His methodology may have a few holes in it.

[Mr_Cheeze]

Good, that's all I'm looking for. There are those who only wish to politicize every argument while not really taking a stand on an issue. You really didn't do this during your diatribe against Gore. A similar thing was happening in the other global warming thread. Don't be contrary unless you have a definitive statement to make on the issue. It's pointless to say, "Well the methods or data are questionable... so there! "

As for Gore, I'm not a supporter, but, at the very least, you can't fault the man for raising awareness on an important issue without being overly sensational (read: Michael Moore). You don't have to like Al Gore to respect his stand here. I'm sure there are some who think it's just posturing for another attempt at the White House. Maybe, maybe not. But you don't have to be any particular political persuasion to support environmental causes. One of the biggest faults of hard line Republicans in general are their steadfast resistance to green causes for the sole purpose of protecting the big business lobbies that support their candidacies.

[TrailBate]

Which peer reviewed news article are you refering to?


peruse the Global Warming thread right near this one.

[TrailBate]

There was a story just last night on the learning channel, or discovery channel (one of those), about some scientists that experimented on a crop by exposing it to higher levels of CO2, levels they expect in 20 to 40 years. They found a certain crop-eating insect thrived under the higher levels, and destroyed the crop.

[off piste]

Well, sounds like good times are coming for the robins, barn owls and hornets, and certain crop-eating insects.

[catbbq]

Well, sounds like good times are coming for the robins, barn owls and hornets, and certain crop-eating insects.


You guys are so pessimistic.
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/naturalworld/bughouse/panroastedgrasshopper.asp

I am sure Monsanto is working on a CO2 Superbug-Ready corn.

[off piste]

Well, sounds like good times are coming for the robins, barn owls and hornets, and certain crop-eating insects, insecticide manufacturers, and insectivores.

[Mr_Cheeze]

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7004055512

[off piste]

President Bush says he won't see it. While, the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA haven't seen it, the president's science adviser does say the movie is on his to-see list.

[Slider]

Like I said, this guy is no expert.


"The nation's top climate scientists are giving Al Gore's documentary on global warming "An Inconvenient Truth," five stars for accuracy."

Apparently, he is an expert.

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[off piste]

Or he knows how to read a teleprompter.

[Slider]

He wrote what shows on the teleprompter.

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[off piste]

Ok, just Googled it. Unlike the President, I'd like to see it.

[MTBME]

"The nation's top climate scientists are giving Al Gore's documentary on global warming "An Inconvenient Truth," five stars for accuracy."

Sounds like you didn't read the article. The original article I refered to at the begining of this thread was a rebuttal to the statement you made above. Your quote comes from the AP article that raised more questions than it answered. Again...

"AP chose to ignore the scores of scientists who have harshly criticized the science presented in former Vice President Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”"

"In the interest of full disclosure, the AP should release the names of the “more than 100 top climate researchers” they attempted to contact to review “An Inconvenient Truth.” AP should also name all 19 scientists who gave Gore “five stars for accuracy.” AP claims 19 scientists viewed Gore’s movie, but it only quotes five of them in its article. AP should also release the names of the so-called scientific “skeptics” they claim to have contacted."

"The AP article quotes Robert Correll, the chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group. It appears from the article that Correll has a personal relationship with Gore, having viewed the film at a private screening at the invitation of the former Vice President. In addition, Correll’s reported links as an “affiliate” of a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm that provides “expert testimony” in trials and his reported sponsorship by the left-leaning Packard Foundation, were not disclosed by AP. See http://www.junkscience.com/feb06.htm"

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Since Steven Milloy of the Junk Science site is in a small minority of warming-doubters, it would seem to me that he needs to identify the "scores" of Gore critics first. He is calling on the AP to ID their sources by using a broad, undefined stat that he pulled out of thin air.

Junk Science is not a research institute in any form. The site offers the opinion of one person, and he's not a climate researcher. Closest thing on his resume is a BA in Natural Sciences. If you want real research, visit any of the the sites of those doing the work, not some hack blogger attention-whore.

Oh, wait. Maybe AP is in on the huge conspiracy, along with the atmospeheric researchers. I bet they have weekly meetings, with refreshments, to plan this scam. Must be a fun time.

BTW here's a link to a longer version of the AP story, where they ID specific researchers contacted for their poll.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/G/GORES_SCIENCE?SITE=TXPLA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEF AULT

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[Mr_Cheeze]

"The nation's top climate scientists are giving Al Gore's documentary on global warming "An Inconvenient Truth," five stars for accuracy."

Sounds like you didn't read the article. The original article I refered to at the begining of this thread was a rebuttal to the statement you made above. Your quote comes from the AP article that raised more questions than it answered. Again...

"AP chose to ignore the scores of scientists who have harshly criticized the science presented in former Vice President Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”"

"In the interest of full disclosure, the AP should release the names of the “more than 100 top climate researchers” they attempted to contact to review “An Inconvenient Truth.” AP should also name all 19 scientists who gave Gore “five stars for accuracy.” AP claims 19 scientists viewed Gore’s movie, but it only quotes five of them in its article. AP should also release the names of the so-called scientific “skeptics” they claim to have contacted."

"The AP article quotes Robert Correll, the chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group. It appears from the article that Correll has a personal relationship with Gore, having viewed the film at a private screening at the invitation of the former Vice President. In addition, Correll’s reported links as an “affiliate” of a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm that provides “expert testimony” in trials and his reported sponsorship by the left-leaning Packard Foundation, were not disclosed by AP. See http://www.junkscience.com/feb06.htm"






I would say that for every scientist biased towards Gore and favoring the film could easily be canceled out by every scientist biased towards (and getting paid by) the oil and other industries that are fighting hard against tougher environmental policy. What does that leave? Unless you can prove otherwise, it leaves a majority of scientists who have nothing to gain or lose and yet still buy into the global warming theories.

So I ask you specifically, MBTME, because your other allies in this debate have lost footing by admitting that they do believe in environmental conservation on some level. Do you? Or would you have no form of regulation upon all of those pro-Republican industries and oil companies that stand to take hits from such legislation? What does it really prove to attack Gore's methods and theories? That all of this hubbub is much ado about nothing? Do you disagree that Gore's basic premise is just? Where do you stand besides being anti-Gore/anti-Democrat?