"Al Gore's environment perspective" poll

Do you believe in Al Gore's environmental perspective?

Yes...2
No...3
Partially...2

I am not going to go into the Gore/global warming issue. I have my perspective and stated it elsewhere at the this blog and frankly, I become bored with all of the hype and unscientific evidence and will only say that Al Gore has made a mockery of science and exploited the global warming issue.

"From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype"

by

William Broad

March 13th, 2007

The New York Times

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

"I don't want to pick on Al Gore," Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. "But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data."

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made "the most important and salient points" about climate change, if not "some nuances and distinctions" scientists might want. "The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger," he said, adding, "I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand."

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in "An Inconvenient Truth," which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for "getting the message out," Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were "overselling our certainty about knowing the future."

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe's recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

"He's a very polarizing figure in the science community," said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. "Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore."

"An Inconvenient Truth," directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. "Unless we act boldly," he wrote, "our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes."

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

"He has credibility in this community," said Tim Killeen, the group's president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. "There's no question he's read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way."

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, "Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees," adding that Mr. Gore often did so "better than scientists."

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president's work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws." He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

"We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. "On the other hand," Dr. Hansen said, "he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate."

In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. "Of course," he said, "there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions."

He said "not every single adviser" agreed with him on every point, "but we do agree on the fundamentals" — that warming is real and caused by humans.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. "I have received a great deal of positive feedback," he said. "I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments." He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, "I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it."

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of "shrill alarmism."

Some of Mr. Gore's centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe's warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore's message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world's seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. "Climate change is a real and serious problem" that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. "The cacophony of screaming," he added, "does not help."

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore's portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did "indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios." But the June report, he added, shows "that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years."

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore's claim that the energy industry ran a "disinformation campaign" that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

"Hardly a week goes by," Dr. Peiser said, "without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory," including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

"Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet," Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. "Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change."

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore's claim that "our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this" threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to "20 times greater than the warming in the past century."

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore's assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. "I've never been paid a nickel by an oil company," Dr. Easterbrook told the group. "And I’m not a Republican."

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming's effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

"For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims," Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. "We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts."

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.

"On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject," Dr. Oppenheimer said. "For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you're going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right."

Hyperbolic sentiment--the engine of illogical thinking

I have avoided discussion of the hot and current topic of "global warming" for it is much like a discussion concerning religion/theology and science. After a while it gets boring with no one budging from their respective positions. Global warming is fraught with bad logic, poor and incomplete data often misinterpreted and misunderstood, and whipped up by hysteria of massive proportions especially from the guru Al Gore and many misinformed and often quoted scientists.

I will not contest that there are pockets of events that indicate a general global warming and that mankind may have a significant role in contributing to those phenomena but to make a sweeping [and illogical] conclusion that mankind is the sole contributor and responsible is inaccurate. And it is even worse to make dire predictions of doom and gloom. Data and documentation of the Earth's history is lacking over millions of years and to base current status and predictions based on climate conditions mostly based on collected data since the Industrial Revolution is shallow...the whole picture of portraying a dynamic Earth [warming and cooling] based on 200 years of data is unscientific. The ebb and flow of climatological changes of Earth may be perfectly normal but when it involves human activity it gets whipped into doom and gloom and a lot of finger pointing.

"Global warming a New Religion"

by

Brian Durrant

March 10th, 2008

Bits of News

There was an article in Newsweek which reported that 'there are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically, and these changes may portend a dramatic decline in food production with serious implications for just about every nation on earth'. 'What's new about this?’ you might ask. After all, we are bombarded daily with scare stories about the future of the planet. But this article is significant because it came out in April 1975 - and the fear expressed in the text was not about global warming, but about global cooling!

For several years in the 1970s the fear of global cooling continued to inspire a spate of articles and books, including Climate Change and World Affairs, by British diplomat Crispin Tickell. But then quite suddenly, around 1978, global temperatures began to rise again. The panic over global cooling quickly evaporated.

There is a simple explanation for this temporary hysteria. In imagining the future, human beings like to extrapolate an exaggerated version of a tendency they are experiencing at the time. What commentators were noticing in the 1970s was that the average temperature of the earth had been in decline for 30 years. But the one certain thing about the climate is that it is always changing.

Ten years on from the end of the global cooling panic, scientists were saying unless urgent and drastic action was taken to curb CO2 emissions, the temperature rise would soon be so great as to unleash catastrophic consequences. The ice caps would melt. Sea levels would rise. Deserts would expand. The world's climate systems would be thrown into chaos. The fear of global warming was born.

And it was truly remarkable how quickly this became the prevailing orthodoxy. So strong were the convictions of the adherents that their case was so self-evident that scientifically it was no longer open to question. The transcendent importance of the cause was buttressed by insisting repeatedly that their view was supported by the overwhelming 'consensus' of scientists.

But 'consensus' is a political concept, not a scientific one. Consensus finds a way through conflicting opinions and interests. Consensus is achieved when the outcome of discussion leaves everyone feeling they have been given enough of what they want. The accomplished politician is a negotiator and conciliator. The process of scientific enquiry could not be more different. The accomplished scientist is an original, an extremist and iconoclast. Good science requires perpetual open debate, in which every objection is aired and dissents are sharpened, not smoothed over.

The response to the threat of global warming has been a political one. In 1988 the United Nations assumed responsibility for the collective response of the human race to this threat. The UN set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unbelievably, an active lobbyist for the planned IPCC had been Sir Crispin Tickell, previously of global cooling fame.

In 1989 a group known as the 'Union of Concerned Scientists', which originally campaigned for nuclear disarmament, organised a petition urging the recognition of global warming as potentially the greatest danger to mankind. Of the eventual 700 signatories, amongst whom included Nobel Prize winners, only three or four were climatologists. The consensus of scientists was a purely political contrivance.

The cause quickly became fashionable with Hollywood, with the likes of Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand and Meryl Streep jumping on the bandwagon. Suddenly there was a great deal of money available for research into climate change, particularly for those who could make the case for man-made global warming. At the same time those who came up with inconvenient results were ostracised. The self-proclaimed high priest of global warming, Al Gore, compared 'true believers' such as himself to Galileo, bravely standing for the truth against the blind orthodoxy of the time.

In 1990 the IPCC produced its first assessment report. The summary was an exercise in spin that Alistair Campbell would have been proud of. It largely ignored grave reservations by some contributors and presented the expectation of substantial man-made warming as firmly based in science. The summary spawned the 1992 Rio Earth summit, which in turn paved the way for the Kyoto agreement in 1997, which called for carbon emissions to be scaled back.

The global warming lobby works on the following principles: Global warming is a fact. It is caused by man's activities. If mankind could be persuaded to alter his behaviour the planet would be saved. The goodies are those who are committed to saving the planet, the baddies are the deniers. The simplicity of the argument makes it a favourite topic in primary schools across the country.

Alarmist activists operating in well-funded advocacy groups have a lead role in creating an unbalanced story. In many cases they manipulate public perceptions with emotive and fiercely judgmental 'scientific' pronouncements, adding a tone of danger and urgency to attract media coverage.

Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, is a case in point. Our government and the educational establishment appeared to be quite relaxed about this being shown in our secondary schools. That is, until a school governor from Kent contested it in the High Court. Mr Justice Burton identified nine significant errors, and said that some of Mr Gore's claims had arisen in the context of alarmism and exaggeration. He went on to say that the apocalyptic vision was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change. Specifically he took issue with the claim that sea levels could rise 20 feet 'in the near future', when such a rise would only take place after over 1,000 years.

Sexing up the global warming story is seen as a legitimate tactic to hog media attention. If you exaggerate a story enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. This leaves little space for alternative views to be aired.

However, there is an inconvenient truth for Mr Gore. Astronomers have noted in 1998 that Triton, Neptune's largest moon, seemed to have heated up significantly since it was visited by the Explorer space probe in 1989. Moreover, in 2002 it was reported that the temperature on Pluto had risen by two degrees Celsius in 14 years. Furthermore, in 2005 NASA confirmed that the CO2 'ice caps' near Mars' South Pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Warming, yes. Man-made? Certainly not.

Evidence that warming is taking place throughout the solar system, even though the mechanism is unclear, implies a common cause may be at work that it not limited to events on this planet. And it is the man-made element to the story that gives climate change activists their real motivation.

But one thing keeps puzzling me. The supporters of the global warming orthodoxy are only too happy to proclaim that unless drastic steps are taken to combat the threat, the earth is heading for catastrophe. However, surveying the measures that are actually being advocated, they are astonishingly trivial. Low energy light bulbs, switching your TV off at night, wind power and carbon emissions trading. Even if the aspirations of the Kyoto protocols are met in their entirety, this would only supposedly delay the global temperature rise predicted for 2100 by just six years.

To understand the emergence of the global warming activists, you have to look at the dynamics of politics, or indeed religion, rather than science. It may be no coincidence that the emergence of global warming as an issue came at the same time the Cold War ended. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 finally demonstrated the superiority of market-based economies over command economies in delivering prosperity. For those of a left wing disposition who thought Marxism would deliver a socialist utopia, this was tough to take. The solution was to jump on the global warming bandwagon. This helps explain the peculiar passion with which many enthusiasts for the man-made global warming thesis argued their case and advanced policy solutions. The ideological pattern is familiar. Just as blame for industrial squalor and deprivation was laid on capitalism, the blame for the ruin of our planet was laid on the greed and materialism of the developed world, particularly the US. And just as the Marxist solutions involved confiscation of the wealth of the rich, the new orthodoxy clamour for restrictions on rich lifestyles; their gas guzzling 4X4s , their polluting air travel and all other examples of self-indulgent consumption at the cost of the planet.

There is no doubt that environmentalism fulfils a political and indeed spiritual need among its adherents. The global warming narrative embraces a myth of the Fall; the loss of harmony between man and nature caused by our materialistic way of life. In reality this Eden never existed. It reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons of two cavemen talking "clean air, no pollution, unadulterated food... how come we don't live over 30?" The apocalypse myth is equally familiar. 'Our wickedness has damaged our inheritance and only immediate reform can save us'. For a long time environmentalists lacked the Apocalypse myth. The fear of acid rain came and went. But global warming fits the bill. This is why environmentalists attach so much importance to the assertion that the world is not just warming up, which is true at the moment, but that the warming is mainly our fault, which still should be a matter of debate. The connections between rising carbon dioxide concentrations and the growth of industrial society, provides a convenient link between the sins of our past and a catastrophic future. This narrative does not depend exclusively on factual accuracy.

Now as I have pointed out above, the solutions of wind power and cycling to work, etc. are insignificant, in practical terms, for heading off the predicted catastrophe. But this is why environmentalism is a religion. Every religion needs rituals of observance which demonstrate the commitment of the adherents. So the committed evangelicals, with time on their hands, sit on runways or on the roof of the Houses of Parliament or spend their Bank holidays outside power stations, while busy pop stars can buy carbon offsets. It's a broad church.

Moreover, it is interesting that governments in developed countries are treating environmentalism not as a threat posed by Marxism, but like another religion. Governments have not opposed the environmentalist creed, just as they do not question the tenets of other faiths. Indeed, like other religions, environmentalism has been a force for good, leading to cleaner air and rivers and the phasing out of fluorocarbons. And like other religions, governments are using it for their own purpose when it suits, and ignoring it when it doesn't. So the Government is using the threat of global warming as a cover for raising new taxes it could not otherwise get away with. A good example is the phoney government environmentalism that provided the pretext for the 'fuel escalator' that saw petrol prices surging above inflation year on year. But at the same time its green credentials are only skin deep, as it is not standing in the way of increased airline capacity at Heathrow.

Meanwhile, businesses are treating the environmental movement as it treats other trends in consumer behaviour. The companies themselves do not have to believe in the doctrines, but have found it commercially expedient to acknowledge the apparent rapid increase in awareness in this area.

However there are unsavoury areas where the global warming brigade mirrors the worst excesses of organised religion, namely hypocrisy and intolerance. Al Gore, the high priest of climate change, has a 20-room mansion in Nashville that uses 20 times more electricity than the average American house. Yet he has exhorted his fellow citizens to reduce their carbon footprint. Gore's defence is that he bought renewable energy credits to offset his carbon use. In the Middle Ages, the wealthy members of the church bought 'indulgencies' or relics to speed their passage through purgatory. Nothing new there then.

It is nearly 20 years since Al Gore cast himself in the role of Galileo. But now the boot is on the other foot. Global warming is the orthodoxy and with it comes intolerance. You are always going to get outrageous comments from the overzealous foot soldiers in any religion. The worry is when intolerance comes from senior figures that should know better.

Bjorn Lomborg is no climate change denier, nor does he quarrel with the view that man-made influences are a cause. However in his latest book, Cool It, he argues that the costs of imposing radical carbon abatement measures are very high and the benefits are limited. Scarce resources could be better spent combating malaria in Africa and so forth. Lomborg's analysis is calm, civil and even-handed. In response Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, told a newspaper "If you should follow the thinking of Lomborg, then possibly what Hitler did is right." Meanwhile, the Guardian's environmental correspondent, George Monbiot in 2006 said: "Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and unacceptable as Holocaust denial."

In 30 years time, if we are found to be wrong to be sceptical about the IPCC's line on climate change... can we expect to be the accused in a show trial and then burned at the stake as heretics?

Regards,

Brian Durrant

[Brian Durrant has a Masters degree in economics from Cambridge University, followed by nearly 25 years' experience in the City. In the 1980s Brian worked with Tim Congdon in the economics department of stockbrokers, L. Messel & Co. And in the 1990s he was Head of Research at GNI, the leading futures and options broker, specialising in exotic options strategies in foreign exchange markets.

Brian Durrant has been the Investment Director of The Fleet Street Letter since 1999.]