« I-WordMarch 13, 2003 »

Getting Warmer

OOPSDATE: Scientific mission to North Pole to prove Global Warming aborted due to frostbite.

First Channel Four’s “Great Global Warming Swindle,” now the New York Times, “hype” and “exaggeration.”  The flood waters rising around Gore, warmglob enthusiasts. Oh, the treachery!   

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth” … 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 … 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.”

… 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.”

… 

“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.”

… 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.”

… 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.

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.

… 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 … 

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 … ”all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

…

“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.”

Damn. But let’s end on a high note: 

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.”

 

Topics: media, pols, science, warmalism

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:53 pm on Monday, March 12, 2007

6 Responses to “Getting Warmer”

1. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   March 13th, 2007 at 1:39 am

   In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.

   Hmmmmm………Gore gets many of the facts wrong (e.g., sea level rises), ignores key details (like the medievel warming period and the little ice age), brushes away inconvenient truths (like the reality that CO2 levels tend to follow temperature levels, not the other way round). Yet Gore has “distinguished himself for integrity”.

   Sounds like Oppenheimer needs a refresher course: Integrity 101.

2. davidp Says:
   March 13th, 2007 at 4:58 am

   It looks like JeffS and Jules are true disbelievers.
   Channel Four’s “Great Global Warming Swindle” has already been discredited by one of its star scientists, Carl Wunsch.

3. Bill's Bites Says:
   March 13th, 2007 at 6:20 am

   Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.03.13

   Some maybe I’ll find time to do more with ‘em later things and some things too short to excerpt and too good to not mention. I occasionally move things from Bill’s Nibbles to longer posts as the day goes on.

4. Old War Dogs Says:
   March 13th, 2007 at 6:21 am

   Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.03.13

   Some Bill’s Bites posts, some things I excerpted and linked but I’m sending you to the original post, some things too short to excerpt and too good to not mention. I occasionally move things from Bill’s Nibbles to longer posts

5. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   March 13th, 2007 at 10:09 am

   It looks like JeffS and Jules are true disbelievers.

   What, is “disbeliever” the new way of saying “denialist”? Sheesh! Why not just call us infidels, and implore Mother Gaia to strike us with lightning for our blasphemy?

6. Bandit Says:
   March 14th, 2007 at 8:36 am

   I’m still waiting on Babs to dump her Malibu beachfront estate because of the impending 20 foot rising sea level.

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