An Inconvenient Al Gore

Given all the recent controversy over the research on global warming, one would think that the media would be all over Al Gore to get his reaction. But no. They are leaving him alone. But the public? Not so much:

Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific near-certitude to the subject of satire, Gore – the public face of global warming – has been silent on the topic.

 

The former vice president apparently finds it inconvenient even to answer calls to testify before the U.S. Senate. You can call him Al . . . but he won’t call back.

On Tuesday, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe – a prominent skeptic of global warming theory and the Republican leader of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee – issued a request for Gore to come testify on global warming. In an interview with FoxNews.com, Inhofe said he wants Gore to appear because “it will be interesting to ask him on what science he based his movie,” a film the senator considers “science fiction.”

Gore has yet to respond, but that didn’t’t prevent him from causing a stir at Apple’s shareholder meeting Thursday. According to CNET, Gore was seated in the first row while several stockholders bashed his high-profile views on climate change. One reportedly said Gore “has become a laughingstock. The glaciers have not melted.”

Gore did not reply, and he has not commented on his blog or Twitter feed.

(via PW

Meanwhile, the IPCC’s defense remains: (emphasis mine)

The chief defense offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless — because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all — the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centerpiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion.

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC’s 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world’s politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December’s Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

Al Gore may not be asked the hard questions that journalist should be asking, but they are letting him defend himself, with pretty much the same defense as the IPCC, in the NYT. Gore seems to imagine that there were really only two minor mistakes made in the IPCC reports. But actually there were 19 major mistakes. Here are a compilationof them.

But this is the important point. Because these researchers conveniently destroyed all their data, there is no evidence at all that the earth has warmed. Are we getting that? Maybe it has. Maybe it hasn’t. But given the shoddy “research” and the destroyed documents, we have no real evidence that the earth is indeed warming. We have only the studies of descredited scientists based on destroyed evidence. Keep in mind that all the scientists in the world that lined up behind global warming, did so based on this destroyed evidence.
 
The old saying, “follow the money,” applies here. From carbon credits to cap and trade, trillions of dollars were posed to be spent on “saving the planet.” It always comes down to money, doesn’t it? People who truly care about the earth enough to not try to fudge numbers or studies, should be royally ticked. 

Now, the British Met will reconstruct temperature records from the last 150 years independently, and from scratch in an effort to re-analyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization.

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