Some Inconvenient Truths For Gore
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, October 11, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Junk Science: Al Gore's documentary on climate disaster has been ruled a work of fiction by a British judge. In legal terms, his global warming hysteria has been assuming facts not in evidence.
Gore has long insisted that the debate over disastrous and imminent climate change induced by man-made global warming is over. A unanimous scientific "consensus" had formed, and the only doubters were "deniers" who also believe the moon landings were filmed on a movie lot in Arizona.
The British government apparently believed this, making Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" part of the British secondary school curriculum. The greenies were happy, if for no other reason than convincing impressionable children and future voters is easier than defending their theories before award-winning pioneers in the field.
Stewart Dimmock, a school governor in Kent, said the government's decision amounted to brainwashing of children. Justice Michael Burton of the High Court in London, while agreeing warming is man-induced, also supported Dimmock's view that "(Gore's film) is not simply a science film . . . but that it is a political film."
Burton ruled that the film could be shown to British students, but only on the condition it be accompanied by new guidance notes for teachers to balance Gore's "one-sided" views. Burton documented nine major errors in Gore's film and wrote that some of Gore's claims had arisen "in the context of alarmism and exaggeration."
The first error Gore made, according to Burton, was in his apocalyptic vision of the devastation from a rise in sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps. Gore's claim of a 20-foot rise "in the near future" was dismissed as "distinctly alarmist." Burton wrote that such a rise could occur "only after, and over, millennia" and to suggest otherwise "is not in line with the scientific consensus."
As we have noted, the scientific consensus is that sea levels might rise anywhere from 7 inches to 23 inches, but it would take a century for that to occur. Even the latest IPCC report suggested that it would take a thousand years of higher-than-historic temperatures to melt the Greenland ice sheet, the basis of Gore's claim.
On Gore's claim that the loss of Mount Kilimanjaro's snows was due to climate change, the judge said the scientific community had been unable to find evidence of a direct link. In fact, it found the opposite.
In 2002, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson reported that from 1953 to 1976, a period of global cooling that had some predicting a new ice age, a full 21% of Kilimanjaro's main glacier disappeared. It was caused not by man-induced warming, but by deforestation.
Burton said Gore's suggestion that the Gulf Stream that warms the North Atlantic would shut down also was contradicted by the IPCC's assessment that it was "very unlikely" to happen.
Burton also ridiculed Gore's claim that polar bears were drowning while searching for ice melted by global warming. The only drowned polar bears the court said it was aware of were four bears that died following a storm.
There is no word from Gore on whether he thinks Judge Burton was paid off by Big Oil, drives an SUV or thinks the moon landing was fake. For Gore, it's an inconvenient truth that in its first court case, the Industrial Revolution was put on trial and found not guilty on at least nine counts.
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