Britain's Channel 4 Documentary On Global Warming

[Annie]

This has created a kerfuffle throughout England. It's a bit more than an hour:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24760_The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle&only

 

[red states rule]

Even the NY Times is publishing the other side of the globle warming debate


Al Gore’s Really Inconvenient Truth: Even the NY Times is Growing Skeptical
Posted by Noel Sheppard on March 12, 2007 - 22:58.
Question: When you’re a liberal, how do you know if you’re on thin ice, especially the kind that you’re claiming is melting all over the planet due to global warming?

Answer: When even papers like the New York Times are publishing articles skeptical of the junk science you’ve been peddling across the questionably warming globe.

Sure, soon-to-be-Dr. Gore has kind of won an Oscar for his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” even though all he got to take home that evening was Tipper and all the food she was able to stuff into her pocketbook at the buffets thrown in his honor.

However, it must have been a quite shock to find out that the leftists working for Punch Sulzberger were going to publish a not so adoring article after all that oohing and aahing Gore received from the Hollywood elites just days prior (h/t Drudge, emphasis mine throughout):

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.”

Real data? We don’t need no stinkin’ real data. We don’t need to show you our data. The article deliciously continued:

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.

Amazing. The New York Times is suggesting that Dr. Gore might have exaggerated his claims and gone beyond scientific evidence? Somebody other than Punch should pinch me.

Yet, maybe even better were Gore’s absurd explanations for the disparities between his slide presentation and actual science:

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.”

We have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions? Excuse me, doctor, but didn’t you claim that the questions are over, and that a consensus now agrees with your views? Furthermore, isn’t anyone that questions man’s role in this akin to a Holocaust denier much as your friend Ellen Goodman stated? As such, who do you suggest should be asking these questions given answers you've already presented as being unassailable?

Regardless of the answers, conceivably the most shocking element concerning this article was not only how many skeptics were quoted, but also how much space was given to their views. Just look at the number of uninterrupted contrary opinions presented:

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.”

Wow. That’s a lot of skeptics quoted by one of the most liberal newspapers in America, wouldn’t you agree?

I wonder what this means for the so-called consensus. Regardless, Dr. Gore must be wondering if he's back in Florida counting chads.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11377

 

[red states rule]

http://www.trac.org.au/cgi-bin/test?page=/myths/top10.htm

Top 10 Global Warming Lies!

Claim 1: Temperatures are Hotter and Rising Faster Than Ever Before.

Claim 2: Warming Will Create Unusual Weather and Animal Events

Claim 3: Warming is Melting The Arctic Glaciers and Greenland Ice Sheets and Raising Sea Levels.

Claim 4: Warming is Melting the Antarctic Which Is Contributing to Sea Level Rises and Flooding of Coastal areas and Sinking of Islands

Claim 5: Warming is Causing World-Wide Loss of Coral reefs.

Claim 6: There is No Other Explanation for Global Warming.

Claim 7: 2003 European Heat Wave was Responsible for Many deaths.

Claim 8: Warming is Responsible for Malarial and Other Disease Outbreaks.

Claim 9: Scientists Agree that Anthropogenic CO2 is the Cause of Global Warming

Claim 10: The Predictions of the Computer Models are Reliable

 

[bobn]

I wonder how you explain sea levels rising other than ice melting/water expanding due to warming (?)

 

[boedicca]

Very few people are disputing that the Earth is warming - the debate is regarding the cause and the magnitude. We have been on a warming trend since the mini ice age that bottomed out around 1600. The Earth getting warmer is not necessarily a Bad Thing.

 

[red states rule]

I wonder how you explain sea levels rising other than ice melting/water expanding due to warming (?)

'Stranded Polar Bear' Photo Taken Out of Context Says Photographer
Posted by Jake Gontesky on March 20, 2007 - 17:34.
Crossposted from Notes in the Margin

The "stranded polar bear" photo continues to grab headlines, even after yet another thorough debunking. In what has become the furry, cuddly symbol of all that is wrong with the climate change debate, the now ubiquitous photo was splashed across news pages worldwide, with captions such as this from the Daily Mail (click for article and image):

They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.
See more articles with the same specious claims here, here, and the NYTimes version with photo caption correction appended here.

There was just one problem: the photograph was taken not of polar bears "stranded" on ice - far from it.


Rather, the bears were wandering around their natural environment as they do every day. Read the first-round debunking here and here.

But now there is more. Spiked.com has investigated further by going straight to the source to get the full story from the original photographer. As explained in Rob Lyons' The bear necessities of climate change politics on Friday (emphasis mine):

The student who took the photograph, however, gives a slightly different account: ‘They were on the ice when we found them and on the ice when we left. They were healthy, fat and seemed comfortable on their iceberg.’

Amanda Byrd, an Australian graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), says she took the picture around three years ago - in the summer. The photograph was not ‘taken by environmentalists’ but as part of a field trip with the university.

Furthermore, the photographer wasn't even asked permission:

Byrd is clearly a little miffed that ‘the image you have seen around the world was distributed without my consent, and [with] the wrong byline’.

And logic and reason (aka science) is all but lost when cuddly polar bears are brought into this debate:

For all the polar bear stories, it is far from clear that these bears are an endangered species. Even if a warming world did make things more difficult for them, Arctic temperatures have been considerably warmer in the past – and polar bears survived those periods. It’s not even clear that polar bear numbers are in decline.

How many of the mainstream media outlets that used this photograph in stories on the new IPCC report or other climate change stories will publish a correction? How many will reveal that the photograph was not only incorrectly captioned, but also incorrectly attributed as portraying yet another direct impact of man-made global warming? I'm not holding my breath.

So why is this important? After all, it is just a photo, right? Not quite. It just so happens that it is a photo that has been viewed by thousands of people worldwide who now (incorrectly) associate it with global warming. It is part of a larger picture of alarmism that is continually supported by the mainstream media.

Even with this most recent thorough debunking, the myth carries on. The polar bear is now the mascot of yet another global warming alarmist website. Al Gore couldn't find any struggling polar bears, so he had to animate them. The US government is now researching their status as an endangered species. But they are not doing so based on the usual protocol set by the endangered species legislation, but instead in response to a lawsuit by environmentalists such as Greenpeace alleging as much. This story is far from over.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11545

 

[red states rule]

This has created a kerfuffle throughout England. It's a bit more than an hour:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24760_The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle&only

WashPost's Milbank Casts Al Gore As Man of Science, Inhofe As Bible-Thumping Bryan Type
Posted by Tim Graham on March 22, 2007 - 08:12.
The Washington Post can never decide whether its Page Two columnist Dana Milbank is writing news stories or editorials or "news-itorials." But his "Washington Sketch" on Al Gore's Wednesday testimony is artistic indeed, casting Gore as the "champion of scientific thought" and conservative Sen James Inhofe as the William Jennings Bryan character in "Inherit the Wind," the sad back-woods Bible-thumper arrayed against the wisdom of modernity:

Al Gore, star of an Academy Award-winning film, was in town for a double feature on Capitol Hill yesterday. But instead of giving another screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," the former vice president found himself playing the Clarence Darrow character in "Inherit the Wind."


....It was, in many ways, a 21st-century version of the Scopes trial. Only this time, Gore, like William Jennings Bryan a failed Democratic presidential nominee, was playing Darrow, champion of scientific thought. Inhofe was playing the Bryan character, defending his beliefs against the encroachments of foes such as the National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations and the Oscar-hoisting former vice president.

Milbank does allow readers to hear a little of the "savage" conservative "ordeal" Gore was under from Inhofe and Congressman Joe Barton, but mostly, Gore was a superstar:

There was opening-night enthusiasm as hundreds lined up to see Gore make his first appearance in the Rayburn House office building. The demand for seats led staffers to set up two overflow rooms. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, by contrast, attracted barely a glance as she arrived for another hearing moments before Gore's appearance.

This does not qualify as objective reporting.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11579

 

[sitarro]

I wonder how you explain sea levels rising other than ice melting/water expanding due to warming (?)

Watch the film, they explain it very well.

 

[sitarro]

This has created a kerfuffle throughout England. It's a bit more than an hour:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24760_The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle&only

I just finished watching this film and thought that it would be funny that so many people have fallen for the bullshit science that has gone into pushing Global Warming except that it isn't funny. These people are making a great deal of money to perpetuate their own jobs by constantly raising the repercussions of this junk theory.

Great film!

 

[red states rule]

New Gallup Poll: Americans Not Nearly as Concerned About Global Warming as Al Gore
Posted by Noel Sheppard on March 13, 2007 - 10:46.
March 12, 2007, was a lousy day for soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his not so merry band of global warming alarmists.

Shortly before the publishing of a New York Times article discrediting some of the junk science on display in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” a poll was released by the Gallup Organization with the damning headline:

To Americans, The Risks of Global Warming Are Not Imminent

Daniel Powter better get ready, for this certainly wasn't a fine beginning of the week for the man who would be global warming king (emphasis mine throughout):

[O]nly a small fraction of the public names global warming in unaided measures of perceived problems facing the nation or as a top government priority. Although a majority of Americans say they are at least fairly worried about global warming, the issue ranks near the bottom of other environmental issues rated.

Awwwww. And Al and his buddies spent so much time and money on this issue. What a shame. Yet, that wasn’t the end to Gallup’s findings:

Generally speaking, not much more than one-third of Americans are "very worried" about any of the seven effects of global warming measured in the survey… All in all, Americans don't seem to consider global warming an imminent threat to the welfare of the planet -- thus supporting the idea that while Americans may sincerely worry about the problem, it is not a burning or top-of-mind issue for them.”

It appears that regardless of the desk-pounding by the media, the left, and Dr. Gore about a consensus on this issue, America isn’t buying it.

Methinks Al needs a little Daniel Powter to cheer him up. All together now:

Where is the moment we needed the most
You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost
They tell me your blue skies fade to gray
They tell me your passion's gone away
And I don't need no carryin' on

You stand in the line just to hit a new lowYou're faking a smile with the coffee you go
You tell me your life's been way off line
You're falling to pieces every timeAnd I don't need no carryin' on

Because you had a bad day
You're taking one downYou sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know
You tell me don't lieYou work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day
The camera don't lie
You're coming back down and you really don't mind
You had a bad day
You had a bad day
Will you need a blue sky holiday?
The point is they laugh at what you say
And I don't need no carryin' on

You had a bad day
You're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know
You tell me don't lieYou work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day
The camera don't lie
You're coming back down and you really don't mind
You had a bad day

Hehehehe </sardonic laugh>.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11387

 

[bobn]

I have seen the film and there are a lot of mistakes and errors in it.

Sea level is rising due to global warming, contrary to claimed above.

 

[sitarro]

I have seen the film and there are a lot of mistakes and errors in it.

Sea level is rising due to global warming, contrary to claimed above.

And you know this, how? What mistakes and how did you come to that conclusion? What are your credentials...Meterologist? Climate scientist? Oceanographer? Who pays you?

 

[Dr Grump]

And you know this, how? What mistakes and how did you come to that conclusion? What are your credentials...Meterologist? Climate scientist? Oceanographer? Who pays you?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/

 

[bobn]

And you know this, how? What mistakes and how did you come to that conclusion? What are your credentials...Meterologist? Climate scientist? Oceanographer? Who pays you?

I don't need credentials to know the arguments made were bad, just some simple knowledge about the issue. The documentary falls short of that. Dr Grump posts a link that sums the problems with the documentary up well.

 

[red states rule]

ABC Highlights 'Frightening' Global Warming Report from UN
Posted by Brad Wilmouth on April 2, 2007 - 01:52.
On Sunday evening, ABC's World News featured a story on the upcoming report from the United Nations enumerating its predictions of dire consequences of global warming. Anchor Dan Harris referred to a February report that said it is "virtually certain that humans are to blame" for global warming as he set up the latest report's "frightening" predictions. Harris: "The first report back in February said global warming is real and that it is virtually certain that humans are to blame. What Friday's report will do is break down the impacts of global warming region by region across the world, and degree by degree. This forecast is, in a word, frightening." (Transcript follows)

Correspondent Bill Blakemore conveyed the expected "alarming" consequences of global warming, such as "more drought and rising sea level" and crop failures. The only supporting sound bites in the story were provided by Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network, as he spoke of the possibility of large numbers of refugees from countries like Bangladesh. Blakemore concluded: "The study makes clear it's the poorest countries with the least money to adapt to the rising temperature that will be hit hardest."

Below is a complete transcript of the story from the Sunday April 1 World News:

Dan Harris: "Coming up this Friday, a United Nations panel on climate change will release the second of four major reports. The first report back in February said global warming is real and that it is virtually certain that humans are to blame. What Friday's report will do is break down the impacts of global warming region by region across the world, and degree by degree. This forecast is, in a word, frightening. Here's ABC's Bill Blakemore."

Bill Blakemore: "Drafts of the report that have been leaked, final wording due on Friday, show why scientists have been warning that its news is alarming. It shows a world already changing dramatically, more drought and rising sea level. And scientists are finalizing this chart that projects what is coming -- how, with each degree of future warming, Earth's natural life support systems break down more and more. For example, with two more degrees warming, as many as 1.5 billion more people might not have enough water, such as those who for millennia have depended on melting snow pack and glaciers. Everywhere, more and more species face extinction. In regions already drying out, even more crops would fail."

Peter Schwartz, Global Business Network: "When you think about places like Bangladesh, where they have already overstressed societies, and they get hit with severe droughts or severe storms, they're going to experience massive disruption."

Blakemore: "Peter Schwartz directed a new study for the defense and intelligence community examining how global warming could produce emergencies when an already stressed system -- say, where there's long-running drought -- is suddenly hit by a spike in the rising average temperature."

Schwartz: "What you can end up with is literally 100 million people homeless, in places like Bangladesh, having to move to places like India and China, which will not be particularly welcoming of vast numbers of refugees. You'll have a refugee crisis like the world has never seen."

Blakemore: "Scientists say the world's average temperature will rise about two degrees in the next 50 years, no matter what we do, but that if we act now, it might level off after that. That means, say scientists, we must act on two fronts: Figure out how to prevent temperatures rising even more, starting 50 years from now, and, in the meantime, figure out how to adapt to the heat rising between now and then that we cannot prevent. The study makes clear it's the poorest countries with the least money to adapt to the rising temperature that will be hit hardest. Bill Blakemore. ABC News, New York."

http://newsbusters.org/node/11758