Al Gore May Be Full of Hot Air, Singlehandedly Causing Global Warming
January 30, 2007
I supported Gore in the 2000 election, and I still think he’d be a pretty good President. But after reading this article about Gore’s refusal to listen to opposing viewpoints (subscription only, download PDF here) and his Michael Moore-ish embellishment of the facts, I’m a little less convinced that his perspective on Global Warming is the right one.
I think, it’s possible that we may need to think about taking a more moderate tack towards global warming…
With all due respect, you need to consider the sources of criticism here and take into account the ax they grind. The WSJ opinion pages are widely recognized to be to the right of the American Enterprise Institute and marginally more accurate than Fox News. Which is to say they aren’t accurate and they have an agenda and they will make libelous slurs.
The “expert” they quote as The Skeptical Environmentalist is in actuality a political scientist. And he purports to do economic analyses.
I’m a defrocked physicist/chemist (nuclear and environmental) who now does computers for a bunch of political scientists and economists, and a few token scientists. Let me assure you that while the former two know how to talk a great game, they really are only worried about the politics and the short term economics. They are fscking clueless about the science and the climate effects. And that’s Lomborg’s weakness too.
The WSJ has long had a hate affair with Al Gore. I don’t even have to read the article to have a pretty good idea what they say about him, and when they use Lomborg to bolster their agenda then I don’t even feel like wasting two minutes of my life to get worked up.
Don’t be fooled. Do your own research.
Dano: I don’t doubt that the WSJ opinion section is pretty damn right wingish. They push an agenda pretty damn hard. But they do make an excellent point about Gore’s unwillingness to listen to opposing viewpoints. If Gore had confidence in his position, he wouldn’t be afraid to take on The Skeptical Environmentalist or any other critic. He would relish the opportunity to shame them and further support his perspective in front of the world.
Gore’s refusal to even hear the other side of the debate is a real problem and damages his credibility as a spokesman for the environment irreparably.
I decided to take Dano’s advice and do my own research. This morning I travelled to the Antarctic and took snow samples from hundreds of feet of depth at various point across the continent and compared the carbon dioxide levels in teh frozen snow over the past century. Then I travelled to Africa and took census data from eight villages both north and south of the Sahara and soil samples from Kenya to note the rise of disease and the rate of drought. To cap it off I flew to New Orleans and measured the height of flooding vs. water temperature of the Gulf of Mexico to compare how hurricane strengths are a function of the melting polar ice caps. In all, my research cost me $87 million dollars. I’m glad I did my own research rather than let someone else do their job for which they are trained for.
My conclusions from this expedition were exactly what I predicted: It would have been better to look at research already done and compare the expert opinion with public opinion. The truth rarely lies in either one exclusively. Problems are never as dire as the public thinks, and solutions never as simple as experts think.
Jeff: That’s why I advocate for listening to a myriad of voices on most issues. If you treat life as a crucible and logical adversarial debate as a flame, then you might get to the truth of things.
I couldn’t agree more. I think nearly everything has to be taken with a grain of salt, but being too cynical is just as corrosive as being too gullible.
I saw inconvenient truth the other day, and I liked it, I thought it was really well put together. I didn’t care for the political diatribes, because no matter the policy whatever party did/did not enact, the trends didn’t change.
fuck the polar bears. up with malaria
Al Gore is the man. If it weren’t for him, people like Bush and Cheney would still be able to get away with pretending that global warming doesn’t exist and censuring government scientists who report it. Plus, if it weren’t for Nader and the butterfly ballot, he’d be our President and I wouldn’t know what the Anbar province is.
[...] When I cited a Wall Street Journal article that pointed out innacuracies in “An Inconvenient Truth”, a number of my commenters asked me to consider the source. [...]