Al Gore Debates Global Warming!

After refusing countless invitations to debate a global warming skeptic, the folks over at JunkScience.com have gone ahead and sponsored a debate on his behalf:


Steve Milloy explains the value:

Last March, the prestigious New York debating society Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on global warming, which may be viewed here. A pre-debate poll indicated that, by 2-to-1 (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided), the audience believed that manmade global warming was a crisis. But in the post-debate poll, the audience reversed its pre-debate views - the ranks of the skeptics swelled to 46 percent, the believers plummeted to 42 percent and the undecided declined slightly to 12 percent.

"That's the power of debate," said Milloy. "Though Al Gore aggressively promotes global warming alarmism, he unfortunately seems to lack confidence in his ability to debating climate change against others. But Al Gore's curious reluctance will hardly stop the public from being able to see how his points stack up against that of climate experts," Milloy concluded.

What Is Al Gore Afraid Of?

He's asked to put his money where his fear-mongering mouth is -- and refuses. From today's Political Diary:

Al Gore thinks the climate crisis is so dire that he's written a book, produced a movie and organized a world-wide music event to raise awareness. These have helped to make him a rich man, but is he willing to put his money where his mouth is? Don't bet on it.

J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and expert on long range forecasting, has offered to bet Al Gore $10,000 that he can do a better job of predicting the future of climate change than the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose forecasts of rising temperatures are cited in virtually every media account. Mr. Armstrong and a colleague, Kesten Green of New Zealand's Monash University, examined the IPCC's work for last month's 27th Annual International Symposium on Forecasting and found it essentially valueless according to established principles of forecasting. "Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder," concluded the two.

So what's Prof. Armstrong's own climate prediction? No change at all. "The methodology was so poor that I thought a bet based on complete ignorance of the climate could do better," says Mr. Armstrong. "We call it 'the naïve model.' Things won't change."

Professor Armstrong is the author of Long-Range Forecasting -- the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods -- and Principles of Forecasting, which was voted a "favorite book" by researchers and practitioners associated with the International Institute of Forecasters. If Mr. Gore accepts his challenge, Prof. Armstrong has proposed that each man put $10,000 into a charitable trust at a reputable brokerage house. The winner would then choose a charity to receive the total amount.

So far, Mr. Gore -- usually quite the opportunist -- has balked at the opportunity to establish credibility with global warming skeptics. "Please understand that Mr. Gore is not taking on any new projects at this time," read a note to Mr. Armstrong from Mr. Gore's communications director.

-- Taylor Buley

'Intellectual Pigmies'

One of the smartest guys alive, George Gilder, author of "Wealth and Poverty" and now something of a microchip genius, weighs in on Al Gore and his horror flick, "An Inconvenient Truth":

The disabling flaw of the Al Gore movie is that nearly all the details (Kilamanjaro, the Chad lake, the spread of diseases and on and on) dissolve as soon as you investigate them. (It’s been colder than usual on Kil; the lake is a few feet deep and disappears cyclically; the diseases are unrelated to GW.)

The key to his scientific argument is the famous Academy Award extrapolation of CO2 increases to the skies, as dramatized by his elevator lift scene.

But far from an exponential, CO2 does not even have anywhere near a linear impact on temperatures. If he compared the increase in CO2 not to existing CO2 but to the gyrations of other greenhouse gasses, particularly water vapor, which is 130 times more voluminous, he would have had to crawl along the bottom of the chart with a magnifying glass.

The idea that CO2, which is absorbed by plants and sustains them (to the extent of a 28% increase in foliage in recent years), is a pollutant of any kind will be regarded by future scientists as the looniest notion of our increasingly innumerate media culture. Nick Tredennick did a great short essay on this. (See http://blog.gildertech.com/index.php?/archives/13-Aliens-Global-Warming.html)

As Richard Feynman pointed out about adjectival "sciences," environmental science probably isn't. It's science for rich upper class dummies like Bobby Kennedy and Sharon Rockefeller who think they should be able to push around current wealth creators because their own wealth is "well seasoned" by time and refined by Ivy "liberal arts." They themselves are intellectual pigmies compared to their forbears in business whom they depend on for their trust fund support and disdain in politically correct fatuities.

Link here (2nd item)

'The End of Civilization'?

"A few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far," The Houston Chronicle reports.

Hmm, you think?

"We face a challenge in the conservation of democracy that we must be up to in order to save the climate balance on which our civilization depends." -- Al Gore

"Disease spread by global warming could kill an extra 185 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of the century and turn millions more into refugees unless rich nations take action now." -- Christian Aid.

"We have less than 10 years." -- James Hansen, NASA scientist

"The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of people's lives ... A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million." -- James Lovelock, climatologist

"The Amazon rain forest could become a desert." -- Woods Hole Research Centre

"40 percent species face extinction." -- the British government

"Two-thirds of world species could be on route to extinction by the end of this century." -- Peter Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden

"One quarter of world's mammals face extinction within 30 years." -- The UN

"By 2050, rising temperatures exacerbated by human-induced belches of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could send more than a million of Earth's land-dwelling plants and animals down the road to extinction." -- Chris Thomas, conservation biologist

UPDATE: Science Direct reports: "Global warming possibly linked to an enhanced risk of suicide."

What Are They Really Afraid Of?

For reasons that perhaps a truly great mind (probably not a scientist) will someday explain, the tendency within the scientific "community" to accuse anyone harboring religious or conservative proclivities of being "anti-science" seems to be growing. The accusation itself is confounding, in that its purveyors hurl it as some sort of self-evident truth, despite the sheer nonexistence of corroborating information.

Isn't it ironic, then, how many stories there are in the news these days about "scientists" trying to silence competing scientists? In the examples offered below, the former category are all adherents to the conventional school of "global warming," while the latter are scientists evincing skepticism.

Most notable is the story of a Weather Channel meteorologist who called for the stripping of professional certification for any weatherman who publicly questions the "world-is-doomed" dogma. (This is a sad day in FunkyPundit Land, as the Weather Channel was once cable's untopped station. Alas, no more.)

Next comes courtesy of Hollywood's cosmopolitan demigod, Al Gore. In a Thursday oped for The Wall Street Journal, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg and newspaper editor Flemming Rose describe an (almost) meeting with the former veep:

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Today he is in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.

The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore's agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled.

Finally, ExxonMobil announced it will no longer fund organizations skeptical of the dire consequences of "global warming," like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Why? Because the "Union for Concerned Scientists" and Sens. Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe told it to.

Now, admittedly, in the second example Gore isn't explicitly trying to silence his critics. But if he's as confident in his climate-change knowledge as he claims, why is he afraid to mix it up with someone bearing different ideas? It's now been well over a year since Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com, challenged Gore to debate climate change. So what is Gore afraid of?

For that matter, what is Weather Channel lady afraid of? What is Olympia Snowe, Jay Rockefeller and the Union of Concerned Scientists afraid of? If the case for "global warming" is so certifiably obvious, why such paranoia?