U.K. Judge rules Gore film 'exaggerated'

U.K. judge rules Gore film 'exaggerated'

Parent challenged the showing of documentary in classrooms

On Saturday, October 13, 2007, Allison Hanes writes in the National Post

"A British High Court judge this week exposed nine inaccuracies in former U.S. vicepresident Al Gore's award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, labelling it "a political film" and calling many of its claims about climate change "alarmist" and "exaggerated."

Justice Michael Burton had been asked to rule on whether the showing of the Oscar-winning film in British classrooms amounted to education or indoctrination.

The ruling, just two days before Mr. Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his environmental activism, did not undermine the overall premise of the work and stopped short of preventing screenings. But it has dramatically altered the uncritical way in which it was being presented to British high school students as debate simmers in Canada and elsewhere over whether what some consider propaganda is being passed off as incontrovertible fact.

The British judgment resulted from a court challenge brought by Stuart Dimmock, the truck driver parent of two teenage sons, who argued that the British government's decision to distribute An Inconvenient Truth to all public high schools violated a provision of the education act forbidding "the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in the school."

After viewing it himself, Judge Burton lauded Mr. Gore's film as "powerful, dramatically presented and highly professionally produced."

But he found the film blurs the line between science, politics and environmental advocacy.

"It is built round the charismatic presence of the ex-vicepresident, Al Gore, whose crusade it now is to persuade the world of the dangers of climate change cause by global warming," Judge Burton wrote. "Is is now common ground that this is not simply a science film -- although it is clear that it is based substantially on scientific research and opinion -- but that it is a political film.

"Its theme is ... that urgent, and if necessary, expensive and inconvenient steps must be taken to counter it."

Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for Mr. Gore, said: "Of the thousands of facts, the judge seemingly only took issue with a handful."

Since the documentary began winning awards, it has become a popular educational tool worldwide.

In Canada, charitable foundations have funded the purchase and distribution of thousands of copies for schools.

But some have questioned whether its contents have been served up not as fodder for discussion and debate, but as scientific fact.

In Surrey, B.C., the school board passed a motion requiring that a documentary espousing a contrary viewpoint -- such as the British film The Great Global Warming Swindle -- be screened for students alongside Mr. Gore's.

Heather Stilwell said proposing the motion earned her the scorn of detractors.

"As soon as you dared to question, then it was in to attack mode. I was called a [George W.] Bush-lover -- I just asked if it was good science," she said. "Who can vote against being balanced in the classroom?"

She applauded the British court decision as common sense.

Victoria Serda, Ontario's deputy Green party leader, has been trained to deliver the slide show presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore gives in the documentary and has done so 67 times in Ontario, before 17,000 people, including school children.

She dismissed the court decision as "minor."

"How can a judge in England make a determination on whether something is scientific fact when he has no background in it?" Ms. Serda said. "This is a judge that doesn't even know what he's talking about, he doesn't work in the field, he's not a climate scientist, he's not a peer-reviewed scientific journalist. He has no basis in order to even go forward with this decision he's making. It's just kind of silly."

The court case brought by Mr. Dimmock resulted in the production of guidelines for teachers on how to bring a more critical viewpoint to classroom discussions of the film.

A first draft by the Education Ministry was produced during the court case, but Judge Burton found it didn't go far enough in addressing nine factual inaccuracies he uncovered in the film by comparing Mr. Gore's claims with a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

New guidelines were produced that draw "specific attention to where Mr. Gore may be in error and/or in any event where he deviates from the consensus view as set out in the IPCC report, and by, where appropriate, raising specific questions for discussions."

Hundreds of copies of An Inconvenient Truth have been donated to Ontario schools by the Tides Canada Foundation.

Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said last summer it is not required viewing and that the government is not endorsing Mr. Gore's position.

Frank Bruseker, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, said he hasn't heard of the film being widely disseminated in his province.

As a former science teacher who has seen the film, Mr. Bruseker said if he showed it in his classroom, he would provide a disclaimer.

"You have to present the whole picture. Part of our job in educating students in my opinion is not to indoctrinate them with our views, but to educate them so they can make their own decisions."

---

NINE CONVENIENT UNTRUTHS

Untruth 1

Gore says: A sea-level rise of up to seven metres will be caused by melting of either West Antarctic or Greenland ice cap in the near future. Cities such as Beijing, Calcutta and Manhattan would be devastated.

Judge says: "This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr. Gore's 'wake-up call.' It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea-level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus."

Untruth 2

Gore says: Low lying inhabited Pacific atolls are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming. "That's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand."

Judge says: "There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened."

Untruth 3

Gore says: The shutting down of the "Ocean Conveyor" would lead to another ice age.

Judge says: "According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is very unlikely that the Ocean Conveyor (an ocean current known technically as the Meridional Overturning Circulation or thermohaline circulation) will shut down in the future, though it is considered likely that thermohaline circulation may slow down."

Untruth 4

Gore says: Two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, show an exact fit.

Judge says: "Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts."

Untruth 5

Gore says: The disappearance of snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming.

Judge says: "The scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change."

Untruth 6

Gore says: The drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming.

Judge says: "It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution."

Untruth 7

Gore says: Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is due to global warming.

Judge says: "It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that."

Untruth 8

Gore says: Polar bears have drowned swimming long distances to find ice.

Judge says: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm."

Untruth 9

Gore says: Coral reefs are bleaching because of global warming.

Judge says: "The actual scientific view, as recorded in the IPCC report, is that, if the temperature were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adapt or acclimatize."

Write to Allison Hanes at her public email address below.

ahanes@nationalpost.com

Terence Corcoran in the National Post Writes Gore's Prize "A Coup For Junk Science"

The Nobel prize used to be awarded to outstanding people. But when it was awarded to the likes of Yassir Arafat, I knew that it was suffering dementia ..... - Editor

Terence Corcoran wrote in the National Post ....

"A Coup For Junk Science"

"Gore's 'truth' Nets Nobel Prize

Global warming theory has been in political and scientific trouble for some time, but who knew it had sunk so low it needed a boost from the Nobel Peace Prize committee?

Rescuing and rewarding the obscure and the absurd has been a Nobel sideline for some years. The award has gone to half a dozen fringe movements and futile causes (the Gameen bank, Mother Teresa, nuclear disarmament, land mine activists, peace negotiators), ineffectual United Nations agencies and personalities (including KofiAnnan and the UN itself ), occasional warmongers (Yasser Arafat), plus an international assortment of minor and woolly-headed players on the world stage (Wangari Masthai, Jimmy Carter).

Onto this heap of forgotten causes and marginalia the Nobel has just tossed Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's official climate science group. What a blow the award must be to the IPCC, self-proclaimed home of scientific rigour, to now be lumped in with Reverend Al and his Travelling Snake Oil Road Show and Climate Terror Machine.

If history is any guide here, the IPCC is now doomed to slide into obscurity, joining the list of similarly feted UN agencies that beaver away in relative obscurity and ineffectiveness, their Nobels rotting on shelves: The International Atomic Energy Agency (2005), United Nations peacekeeping forces (1988), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1981), the International Labour Organization (1969) and the UN Children's Fund (1965).

The first task of the IPCC now, one would think, is to craft a statement disavowing any link with Gore, whose film and book, both titled An Inconvenient Truth, deserved a Nobel for science fiction rather than peace. Not that the IPCC is squeaky clean on the science of climate accuracy. Even the Nobel committee's statement on the IPCC captured the agency's primary role as political shaper of opinion and builder of consensus. IPCC scientific reports have "created an ever-broader informed consensus" about man-made global warming. The Nobel committee said it wanted to "contribute to a sharper focus" on climate change around the world.

Due to the timing of the award, that sharper focus may end up highlighting the gross scientific inaccuracies in Gore's work, thereby making millions of people wonder about the validity of climate science -- and the Nobel -- rather than rush to join its crusading proponents.

Just hours before the Nobel announcement, Gore was busy spinning his way out of a devastating United Kingdom court case that found nine substantial science errors in the film version of An Inconvenient Truth.

The nine errors, listed on Page A19 of this newspaper, are truly major. But Gore's office, in true political form, tried to turn the science disaster into victory, claiming he was "gratified" that the U.K. court had not totally banned distribution of his film in British schools. Instead, it would have to circulate like a package of cigarettes, with a warning label: Children watch this movie at peril of being politically manipulated by Al Gore into thinking what they are watching is true.

This is fine with Gore, apparently, because the mistakes were only a "handful" amid "thousands of other facts in the film."

First of all, there are not thousands of facts in the film, except in the metaphysical sense. It is a fact that the world is presented as a globe floating in space, and a fact that Al Gore's wife looks pretty good in a sweater in the book version. But these are not the facts in dispute. The nine errors are core buttresses that support the whole hysterical narrative in the film and the book.

I don't have the film here to review, but the book is at hand, and it would have to be ripped to pieces to remove the science mistakes found by the court, whole sections removed and key narratives and innuendos thrown out as invalid. There would be nothing left.

The first theme of An Inconvenient Truth is that climate change is already devastating and that "very dramatic changes are taking place." On that page in the book, and the next three, are pictures purporting to show that the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are disappearing. Not true, said the court.

Twenty pages later, a foldout graphic claimed to show 650,000 years of proof that carbon levels in the atmosphere cause temperatures to rise. Not true, said the court. The chart actually shows temperatures increased first, then carbon levels rose. In the film, this sequence alone consumes maybe five minutes, a clever turning point in which Gore mounts a ladder to demonstrate soaring carbon levels and make other false claims.

Pages of photos are built around Katrina and other hurricanes, which the court said cannot scientifically be pinned on global warming.

And so it goes through the book, each of the nine errors a pillar supporting hundreds of subsidiary claims that are now suspect, if not downright wrong. The untrue claim that Chad Lake, in Africa, had disappeared is used to mount an argument that global warming is leading to civil war and genocide in Africa.

The wildly exaggerated sea-level rise in the film and the book is not a small error of fact. It's the basis for a 10-page spread on how "THE MAPS OF THE WORLD WILL HAVE TO BE REDRAWN," showing Florida, Manhattan and San Francisco under water. Pages are devoted to species losses that are not happening.

The question on everybody's mind yesterday was whether the Nobel will spring Gore into the U.S. presidential race. Not a chance, I'd say. The young Al Gore pictured on draftgore.com in reality looks more like the John Travolta character from Hairspray. He is no JFK, as the Gore backers like to think. For more than a year he has refused to engage in any public debate over climate issues, or any issue for that matter. He's hardly ready for public exposure and scrutiny, and would get eaten alive by real opposition and challenge.

Given his science gaffes, and his political liabilities, the Nobel may be more of a liability, not just to Gore but to the entire global warming community. The prize has elevated junk science, gross exaggeration and outright misrepresentation to high international stature, the most prestigious award in the world, discrediting all who work honestly to find the facts and do the right thing."

Global warming? Look at the numbers!

Global warming? Look at the numbers
Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post on Monday, August 13, 2007 “In his enviro-propaganda flick, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claims nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. That's been a common refrain for environmentalists, too, and one of the centrepieces of global warming hysteria: It's been really hot lately -- abnormally hot -- so we all need to be afraid, very afraid. The trouble is, it's no longer true. Last week, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- whose temperature records are a key component of the global-warming claim (and whose director, James Hansen, is a sort of godfather of global-warming alarmism) -- quietly corrected an error in its data set that had made recent temperatures seem warmer than they really were. A little less than a decade ago, the U.S. government changed the way it recorded temperatures. No one thought to correlate the new temperatures with the old ones, though -- no one until Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, that is. McIntyre has become the bane of many warmers' religious-like belief in climate catastrophe. In 2003, along with economist Ross McKitrick, McIntyre demolished the Mann "hockey stick" --a graph that showed stable temperatures for 1,000 years, then shooting up dangerously in the last half of the 20th Century. The graph was used prominently by the UN and nearly every major eco-lobby. But McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated it was based on incomplete and inaccurate data. To NASA's credit, when McIntyre pointed out their temperature errors they quickly made corrections. Still, the pro-warmers who dominate the Goddard Institute almost certainly recognized the impacts these changes would have on the global-warming debate, because they made no formal announcement of their recalculations. In many cases, the changes are statistically minor, but their potential impact on the rhetoric surrounding global warming is huge. The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third. Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. Claiming that man-made carbon dioxide has caused the natural disasters of recent years makes as much sense as claiming fossil-fuel burning caused the Great Depression. The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards. In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late. Ever since the correction became a hot topic on blogs, the pro-warmers have tried to downplay its significance, insisting, for example, that the alterations merely amount to "very minor rearrangements in the various rankings." It's true the changes aren't dramatic. But the optics are. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine the shrieking of the warmers if we had previously thought that hot years were scattered throughout the past 130 years, but after a correction the warmest years could be seen to be concentrated in the past decade. They would insist the revised data proved their case. They would blitz every news organization and talk show. They would demand to be allowed to indoctrinate school children on the evils of cars and factories. So they shouldn't be permitted to brush aside this new data, which makes their claims harder to prove. Ten years ago, warmers found a similarly small error in the temperature data collected by weather satellites. The satellites were a thorn in their sides because while the warmers were insisting the Earth was getting hotter, the satellites showed it was in fact cooling ever so slightly. Then the warmers discovered that the scientists who maintained the orbiting thermometers had failed to account for orbital decay, the almost infinitesimally small downward drift of the "birds" every year. When the effects of drift were added into the observations, the cooling was found to be just 0.01 degree per decade rather than the 0.04 degrees previously claimed. On this basis, the warmers now insisted then that even the satellites were somehow in agreement with their theory. Of course, the current NASA changes are only for data collected in the United States. But available surface temperature readings cover only half the planet even today. Before the Second World War, they covered less than a quarter. So U.S. readings for a period that goes as far back as 1880 are among the most reliable there are. Perhaps we will have uncontrollable warming in the future, but it likely hasn't started yet.” Write to Lorne at his published email address lgunter@shaw.ca

Assault on Reason - by Who? Is it Al Gore's Bio?

Al Gore’s assault on democracy

An excerpt from Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason”:

American democracy is now in danger — not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

The assault on democracy began on Nov. 8, 2000. An hour after Gore conceded the election to George W. Bush, Gore called back to renege. Gore was not going to accept that he had been defeated in the closest election ever.

Gore’s assault dragged the electoral process through the mud of litigation that only served to divide the nation. The vote count in Florida was remarkably accurate — better than 99.9% accurate.

To this date, Al Gore has yet to cede the election, much less apologize to the nation for his rash and disturbing behavior.

Instead, he has spent the last 6 years preaching gloom-and-doom about the environment, while personally burning carbon credits on unnecessary flights in gas-guzzling private jets and setting his mansion’s consumption at 10 times the energy use of a normal American.

Oddly enough, President Bush has an eco-friendly home that uses geothermal energy and rainwater. Bush’s consumption is one-quarter that of the average American.

Yet Gore dares to demonize the president.

In fact, that is all one can expect from this child of wealth and privilege who grew up in the nation’s capital. He was a Fortunate One, a senator’s son. I would not be surprised if he were a bully at the Albans School.

More here ....

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/2007/05/17/al-gores-assault-on-democracy/

Gore vs. Corcoran: Climate Change or GORE-bal Swarming?

Gore vs. Corcoran: Climate Change or GORE-bal Swarming?

Saturday, July 28, 2007 - from National Post
Is Gore Right [That's a laugh:he's Left!] or Corcoran?

IS CLIMATE CHANGE A LOOMING CATASTROPHE? OR A LEFT-WING FRAUD?

Terence Corcoran writes in the National Post "Don't believe Al Gore: Global Warming is a Crock!

He says, "Before we get to the climate change chapter of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, we need to know a bit more about the whole book. It helps put the climate stuff in perspective.

When the climate chapter refers to the "massive and well-organized" campaign of "lavishly funded" disinformation on climate change, backed by "wealthy right-wing ideologues," Gore is merely imposing the big theme of his book on the climate issue.

It's not a new theme. It's the same old leftist paranoia Noam Chomsky has been dispensing for decades: the idea that the media are tools of corporate-capitalist control used by power-hungry groups to undermineand destroy American democracy.

The Assault on Reason, now a bestseller, is a tour de force irrational rampage through the U.S. political system, a pseudo-intellectual pastiche of distorted history, context-dropping quotations, bizarre economic theory, and misrepresentations. Climate change is just a side issue to the book's major objective, which is to portray the United States as a country under the heel of power-hungry cabals of corporate and political interests. Gore calls it a "coalition of right-wing religious extremists and exceptionally greedy economic special interests."

The big theme is that Iraq, U.S. energy policy, climate issues, the Bush presidency and all that is wrong with the world can be pinned on the media. The Internet may eventually save us, but until that happens all citizens are at the mercy of electronic corporate power.

It all began, says Gore, with radio. Stalin, Mussolini, Adolf Hitler -- what do these totalitarian dictators have in common? "Each one mobilized support for his malignant, totalitarian ideology by using the powerful new medium for mass communication: radio."

In the United States, however, government "legal constraints" prevented abuse of radio through most of the last century. But "these constraints were removed during the Reagan administration in the name of 'free speech', and the results have been horrendous." Aha! So Ronald Reagan, that old totalitarian, is the culprit. And now radio, along with television, are controlled by the evil coalition. "One of the most obvious and dangerous consolidations of power has formed in the media, where powerful conglomerates have used their wealth to gain more power and consequently more wealth." Whew.

Now the climate chapter falls into place. These same wealthy right-wing ideologues loom over the climate issue. To prove this, Gore rehashes the trivial nonsense stories about ExxonMobil that are now part of the lore and mythical fabric of climate policy debate.

First we have the allegation that "one of the front groups" funded by Exxon had offered US$10,000 to each scientist who would produce a "pseudostudy" disputing climate science. This phony allegation surfaced in the left wing Guardian newspaper last year. It was based on a plan by the American Enterprise Institute to pay a group of scientists and contributors -- as it often does --an honorarium of US$10,000 to examine key climate issues.

Exxon's role? AEI's total revenues over the last seven years exceeded US$160-million, of which Exxon contributed less than 1% as part of its routine funding of foundations and think tanks. Gore's version of the Exxon science payoff is just a lazy rehash of climate activist dirty tricks. (For a full review of the AEI-Exxon story, search Google under "Scenes from the Climate Inquisition.")

Another dirty trick is the Royal Society's alleged role in rapping Exxon. Gore makes it sound like the full force of the society was brought down on the company. In fact, the society itself never really said anything about Exxon.

What happened was this. Bob Ward, then chief flak with the Society, was leaving the organization to take a new job elsewhere. A few weeks before his departure, he personally sent a letter to his corporate affairs counterpart at Esso UK Limited, a man named Nick Thomas. In the letter, flak to flak, Mr. Ward unloaded a lot of his personal concerns and first-person observations on what he viewed as Exxon's climate science failings. Mr. Ward, a clever manipulator if ever there was one, then leaked his own letter, again to the Guardian, the day before he resigned from the Royal Society. This created a sensation and established the now mythic Royal Society put-down of Exxon--even though it amounted to nothing more than a personal screed from a Royal Society employee who was about to jump ship.

Gore also repeats the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) charge that Exxon "funneled" nearly US$16-million over seven years to 43 advocacy organizations. That would include the US$1.6-million to AEI mentioned above. All other organizations would have received an average of US$330,000. Even the UCS described this as a "modest" funding effort -- and a far cry from the "massive" and "well organized" and "lavishly funded" crusade described by Gore. It's also peanuts compared with the billions and billions funnelled by governments to climate change promotion.

The Frank Luntz anecdote is another bit of recycled material from the trivia-laden war chest of climate activists. No doubt Luntz, a political strategist of the highest cynical caliber, actually did urge politicians to emphasize scientific uncertainty. So what? A larger number of strategists likely urged the opposite. Luntz is just another guy with advice on playing public opinion.

Gore's climate chapter -- including its brief notes on hurricanes, polar ice caps and other climate phenomena -- is a sloppy collage of false material and loose summaries of reports and stories.

In a later section of the climate chapter, not reproduced here, climate gets the full Gore treatment. He ties all his themes together in a typical total irrational meltdown. After a review of Hurricane Katrina as a climate event, Gore connects the dots between the unconnectable. "We were warned of an imminent attack by al-Qaeda; we didn't respond. We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn't respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us of the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization."

When you think about assaults on reason, it doesn't get any worse than that."

If you wish to write to Terence, use his publicly published email address tcorcoran@nationalpost.com

Cold or Hot, it's Always Our Fault

Lorne Gunter writes in the National Post on Monday, July 23,

"If you haven't been following Lawrence Solomon's brilliant, reader-friendly Financial Post series on the scientists who are skeptical of the coming global warming crisis, you really must check it out. It's called Climate change: The Deniers, and there is a link to the 29 profiles he as written so far on the National Post's homepage. (Go to www.nationalpost.com, and scroll down to the "Current Features" section.)

In one instalment -- Forget warming -beware the new ice age -- published in June, Lawrence reminds readers that as recently as the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that earth was entering a new ice age.

If geological history is any guide, we're long overdue for one. And in the 1970s, the world was in the throws of a 30-year phase of especially cold weather. So naturally, scientists put two and six together and came up with impending disaster.

Politicians appointed high-level international commissions to determine when and how bad the coming peril would be. Extensive reports were funded citing this or that disaster as proof of an approaching deep freeze. The popular press was quick to run alarming stories about the disaster that awaited mankind.

In 1975, Newsweek ran a feature story entitled The Cooling World, the first sentence of which insisted: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production -- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

Extreme weather would increase. Drought would grip huge regions of the planet. Crops would fail and tens of millions would starve. Wars would be fought over diminishing resources.

And the evidence for all this? Well, according to Newsweek it had "begun to accumulate so massively" there was no denying it. The scientific world had spoken. Don't bother to voice alternative theories.

Sound familiar?

Reading Lawrence's piece, though, I was struck by another similarity between the alarmism then and now: The proof for each was/is almost entirely circumstantial.

In theory, both global cooling and warming are possible. But all we can see are potential effects. We then look backwards to determine if we can discern a cause.

The scientists and activists who believe the globe is currently warming dangerously don't have any direct proof that carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases are the cause. They merely have a stack of potential consequences that they have convinced themselves amount to incontrovertible proof.

Today, effects such as big hurricanes, spring heat waves, rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and melting polar ice are pointed to as proof that a single cause (man-made carbon emissions trapping solar energy in the atmosphere) exists. As Lawrence reminds, in the 1970s the effects that were used to "prove" the cause included a killing winter freeze in 1972-73, followed by a severe summer heat wave in the United States, "anomalously low precipitation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest during the winter of 1972-73," the failure of the Soviet wheat crop in 1972, the failure of the Peruvian anchovy harvest the same year, even changes in Pacific ocean currents that scientists had never before seen.

So why, in the absence of direct proof, is the UN, along with thousands of scientists and environmentalists worldwide, currently so adamant that our activities -- humans' --are causing a climate meltdown?

British filmmaker Martin Durkin, whose documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has already aired in the U.K. and Australia (and will soon be available here on DVD), thinks it is because "global warming is first and foremost a political theory." [Editor:as we told you here on Windbag-Energy, this is further evidence of what we call "GLOBAL SWARMING" like bees leaving a hive gathering together in a giant swarmball!]

Those who buy into it -- including most scientists who back it -- have a particular worldview that Durkin believes can be "summed up in the oft-repeated phrase 'we consume too much.' " He calls this "backward-looking bigotry," and claims it has "found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalization) into a single unquestionable truth and cause."

In other words (mine, not Durkin's), global warming has become the new locus for those who believe government is the solution to all ills, and central planning the preferred tool. [Editor: Does this sound familiar? Isn't that what socialism or communism is all about? The idea that inefficient government can decide what is best for you and I?]

When they look back through the stack of global warming consequences, they don't want to see any natural explanations. The sun, cosmic rays, cloud development and so on, cannot be controlled by Ottawa or the UN.

So they have grasped (and cling tenaciously to) a theory that might explain the science and favours their bias toward big-government solutions."


If you wish to communicate with Lorne, used his public email address: lgunter@shaw.ca

[Editor:Ominous stormclouds portending that the old communism and the new socialism are not yet dead! Why do we have so much trouble believing that individuals should make choices about their lives, instead of government? Doesn't this sound strikingly hypocritical considering the mantra "a woman should have the say about her own body" but we cannot choose how to live?

Which do we believe? Individual choice or what is supposedly good for humanity? Can government appeal to our positive sides to work toward being more environmentally-friendly or do they have to FORCE us by legislation to do so? Perhaps we don't have a good side and are too stupid to see "impending disaster"? Isn't it time we expose political hypocrisy? We cannot have it both ways:heavy-handed government intervention in everything or 'encouragement legislation' to reward steps toward being greener. It's time to decide! I can just see it now. The next disaster theory will be that 1/2 of the world is going to be too hot and the other half will be veering toward an ice age. There you have it global swarmists:start finding circumstantial evidence without cause for this GLOBAL CRISIS!]


Please feel free to comment unless you have nothing to say.
Photo by Charles Pedley

WINDBAG-ENERGY AWARD NUMBER THREE goes to MICHAEL MOORE

Welcome to the WINDBAG-ENERGY CLUB MICHAEL!

While Michael Moore produces Mikumentaries masquerading as documentaries, real life goes on outside of his fantasy-land brain. Obviously Michael was born to be a Hollywoodian as his films, fueling the foolish or the hate-deluded, deserve top honours in our WINDBAG-ENERGY AWARDS!!!

You may wonder, "Why did we pick Michael Moore?" Fantasy is what Hollywood knows best and it is clear that Michael deserves HIGH HONOURS for depicting fantasy as reality. In fact if Orson Welles had not done it, then Michael Moore WOULD HAVE! The difference being that Orson Welles was using only sound to herald the destruction of earth, while MM videologs his imaginations and holds them out as fact. The simple and the hate-Bushers, quiver at the very news of another Michael Moore "reduction" [as opposed to PROduction] called "Sicko". NO! NO! I did NOT say it was his autobiography. You jumped the idea gun!

While Michael Moore obviously is in need of prayer or counselling to help him view reality, his latest film, Sicko apparently is already making the internet rounds. I have not seen it. It is reported to have such widely-known "FACTS" as the one in London, Ontario where he notes that NOT A SINGLE PATIENT HAS WAITED more than 45 minutes in a hospital emergency room.

Meanwhile, in real life, Canadian Lindsay McCreith would have to wait FOUR MONTHS JUST TO GET AN MRI and months more to see a neurologist for his MALIGNANT BRAIN TUMOUR. Finally frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner TRAVELS to BUFFALO, NEW YORK for a life-saving surgery! What ever happened to facts Michael? Remember truth is something that ACTUALLY HAPPENS, Michael!

Michael is using his talents to lobby for a health care system JUST LIKE my native CANADA where ACTUAL WAIT TIMES vary considerably from his film. Apparently the average Toronto patient receives care in an average time of 4 hours while 1 in 10 wait MORE THAN A DOZEN HOURS. It is reported by writer David Gratzer, that a Winnipeg relative nearly died of strangulated bowel while lying on a stretcher for FIVE HOURS, WRITHING IN PAIN.

The truth happens to be that private health care clinics are now opening in Canada at a rate of about ONE PER WEEK! Since Michael will never see this piece, he will continue to live in la-la land, spewing polluted facts into the stream of reality, and hoping that no one will ever subject his mind to a general checkup , where it is rumoured WAIT TIMES can LAST A LIFETIME!

[Charles Pedley, PRESS-for-TRUTH with credit to David Gratzer for his article in the National Post, Friday July 6, 2007]

Al Gore:my favourite Martian by Peter Foster

Windbag-Energy Award NUMBER TWO goes to AL GORE!

Peter Foster in the Financial Post wrote an interesting piece on "Al Gore: my favourite Martian"

It was subtitled, "(AL) GORE: extra-terrestrial in disguise?"

Apparently Al Gore has been using Venus as an example of climate change comparing Venus's 867 degree temp to Mercury which is much closer to the sun and has temperatures one-third that of Venus. The cause? Venus is a cloud-covered planet which Mr. Gore uses an example of greenhouse effect.

Only thing he forgot to mention is how THE VENETIANS GOT THEIR SUV'S AND FACTORIES BELCHING FORTH SMOKE IN AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF OVER 840 degrees! So if Venus has that high a temperature from volcano eruption, then how is getting rid of your SUV and shutting down all our industries going to stop temperatures like that on Earth?

Here is what he says,

"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it's cold as hell?" --Elton John, Rocket Man [Hey Elton, WHERE YOU GET YO FACTS MAN?]

Elton John won't be performing at next Saturday's Live Earth series of concerts, reportedly the biggest "charitable" music event ever. However, like his Rocket Man, the concerts' main promoter, Al Gore, has invoked life -- or rather its absence -- on another planet as relevant to our situation on earth.

In a piece in last Sunday's New York Times, Mr. Gore suggested that Venus is a valid reference point for the dangers of the enhanced greenhouse effect. Earth's average temperature is a balmy 59 degrees (Fahrenheit), that of Venus a metal-melting 867 degrees. Is that difference due to being closer to the sun? No, says Mr. Gore. Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is practically sitting on the sun! The culprit? "It's the carbon dioxide."

We might note, however, that there have been no reports that X-ray surveys of Venus's cloud-enshrouded surface have uncovered the remnants of coal-fired power plants or SUV factories. Venus's carbon dioxide is thought to come entirely from its volcanoes, indicating the awesome power of natural forces. That presumably isn't the conclusion Mr. Gore wants us to draw.

The Venus reference is important for reasons beyond its typical attempt to use scientific factoids to stoke hysteria. I have long maintained that Al Gore is in fact an extra-terrestrial in disguise, and I would suggest that there were too many other-planetary references in his Times piece for this to be any longer in doubt.

One of Mr. Gore's more earthling rhetorical techniques is to marshal the voices of the noble dead to his cause. In last Sunday's column, he elicited the unlikely support of Ronald Reagan, who once said, "I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."

Given that Mr. Gore is a prime example of psychological "projection" (He accuses George Bush of being obsessed with power and world domination!), should we perhaps call in the Men in Black? I have little trouble envisioning a scenario in which Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones confront Mr. Gore, whereupon he transforms into something with an exoskeleton.

Live Earth certainly represents a gathering of space cadets. It might be called An Inconvenient Truth: The Musical. Apart from Mr. Gore, its main organizer is Kevin Wall, an L.A.-based distributor of digital concerts. Mr. Wall, a veteran organizer of awareness-raising shindigs such as Live Aid and Live 8, claims that he was inspired to join Live Earth by seeing Mr. Gore's documentary. He subsequently changed his life by trading in his Mercedes for a Lexus Hybrid. Despite his admiration for Mr. Gore, Mr. Wall refers to him as "Mr. Rhythm," and acknowledges that he is "a little stiff." But then what do you expect when your inner alien is straining to escape?

Another straw in the solar wind: Mr. Gore reportedly wanted to turn out the lights all over Britain for a brief period at the time of the concert. Was this really an attempt to signal to his home planet? As it turned out, the plot was foiled when the operators of the National Grid pointed out that the power surge when the lights were switched back on might disrupt the entire system, possibly flat-lining hospital patients on life-support.

Live Earth's hypocrisy seems a little out of this world, too. Its stars are among the largest consumers of energy on Earth. They are, however, reportedly being given "green counselling."

Those of a Jacobin temperament have an extraordinary urge to consume their own, and sure enough Greater Moralists have rounded on Live Earth's fellow pop poseurs. Saint Bob Geldof raised a discordant note when he suggested the concert was pointless because "We are all f--king conscious of global warming." Roger "Talking 'Bout My Co-Generation" Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, noted that the concert would represent a waste of fuel. Matt Bellamy, front man for a band called Muse, described it as "private jets for climate change." Case in point, Madonna, who will headline the show in London, reportedly used 440 tonnes of CO2 on her Confessions tour last year.

Live Earth has inevitably spawned a welter of "carbon offsets" to compensate for its very existence. Still perhaps all the artists can get together to record inspirational titles such as "Do they know it's the apocalypse?" or "Hybrids are not enough."

While Live Aid and Live 8 perpetuated the notion that the underdeveloped world's problems are rooted in a failure to redistribute wealth generated in the West, we might still believe that its promoters' and participants' hearts were in the right place. Live Earth has much more dubious political underpinnings. One of the less-publicized is its role in boosting another run by Mr. Gore for the White House. Go to AlGore.org and you will find the "2008 Grassroots Draft Campaign," motto: "The People, Not the Powerful '08."

I hope that Will and Tommy Lee are keeping their weapons charged."

WINDBAG AWARD SUPERSTAR: GORE IS WRONG

Gore's Inconvenient Truth required classroom viewing? - Saturday, May 19

Kevin Libin in the National Post says "First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.

"I really don't understand why they keep showing it," says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). "I've spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to present it as a debate. But every time we've seen it, well, one teacher said this is basically a two-sided debate, but this movie really gives you the best idea of what's going on."

McKenzie says he has educated himself enough about both sides of the climate-change controversy to know that the Al Gore movie is too one-sided to be taught as fact.

Even scientists who back Mr. Gore's message admit they're uncomfortable with liberties the politician takes with "science" in the film. But, McKenzie says most of his classmates are credulous.

His teachers are not much more discerning. "They don't know there's another side to the argument," he says. McKenzie's mother was outraged to find out that Mr. Gore's film was being presented as fact in her son's classroom. "This is just being poured into kids' brains instead of letting them know there's a debate going on," she says. "An educational system falls down when they start taking one side."

But Mr. Gore's filmed climate-change lecture is showing up in classrooms across Canada, frequently unaccompanied by critical analysis or a discussion of competing theories. "One of the teachers at my kid's school showed it and he even said ahead of time, 'There is some propaganda in this,' " says Tim Patterson, a Carleton University earth sciences professor. "I said to him, 'You even knew this was a propaganda film, and you still showed it in your classroom?' " The weirdest part: It was the gym teacher.

If you have children in junior or high school, there is a good chance they have been shown An Inconvenient Truth in school - or they will be soon.

Last month, Vancouver's Tides Canada Foundation and a local eco-friendly courier firm teamed up to buy DVD copies for every public high school in B.C. Climate Learning, a non-profit Vancouver outfit, is a third of the way to raising the $68,000 it needs to buy copies of the film for every high school in the country, after just weeks of campaigning.

"I think it's important for high schools to have this film," says Will Cole-Hamilton, the group's director. "Our objective is to get them into schools by September."

Two weeks ago, 900 students from grade 7 to 12 in Ontario's Halton Region were treated to a screening - sponsored by ethanol producer SunOpta Inc.-with a second showing scheduled at a Georgetown high school this Wednesday. SunOpta has donated 60 copies of the DVD and the book version of An Inconvenient Truth to public and Catholic schools as a resource. After showing the film to students, a London, Ont., board launched a contest for kids to win tickets to hear Mr. Gore address a fundraiser this month, by making their own environmental videos.

Earthcare Canada, an energy-consultant sponsored group, is working with the Ottawa-Carlton school board and one in Belleville, Ont., to raise awareness about energy conservation. The Gore movie is one of the materials it suggests as a teaching resource. "We would definitely recommend it and make them aware that it is there, and then how to use it," says Earthcare's executive director Rose-Marie Batley.

"I get e-mail from parents all across the country about this, in Calgary, B.C., Ontario," says Albert Jacobs, the founder of Friends of Science, a Calgary-based group that promotes alternative theories to climate change. "They say, my kid has been exposed to this stuff which is totally one-sided and totally wrong and we want them to see the other side."

Hand it to Paramount, the studio behind An Inconvenient Truth, for tapping the classroom market in a way skeptics cannot. In addition to a companion book written for school-aged children, producers have created a lesson plan, "AIT in the Classroom," for teachers to download.

In England, the government has made the movie part of the public curriculum. In Spain, the government is buying copies of the movie for all of its schools. In Australia, private donors are buying copies for schools.

Politicians and educators may accept on their face filmed warnings of a world tumbling toward catastrophe if we don't dramatically cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions. But some of Mr. Gore's allies have acknowledged glaring inaccuracies in the film.

Though Mr. Gore was right for "getting the message out," University of Colorado climatologist Kevin Vranes told The New York Times last month that he worried about the film "overselling our certainty about knowing the future." James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist and one of Mr. Gore's advisors, agreed the movie has "imperfections" and "technical flaws." About An Inconvenient Truth's connection of rising hurricane activity to global warming - something refuted by storm experts - Mr. Hansen said, "we need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is." Among other things, since the film's release last year, scientists have rejected Mr. Gore's claims that 2005 was the warmest year on record (temperatures have been receding since 1998), that polar bears are heading for extinction (their numbers are growing), that Antarctica is warming (interior temperature readings show cooling) and that sea levels will "rise 18 to 20 feet," swamping coastal cities (the International Panel on Climate Change predicts a few inches).

Last year, when producer Laurie David offered to donate 50,000 DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association, the group refused, citing a policy "prohibiting product endorsement." In the U.K., one parent is taking the Department for Education and Skills to court to stop it from using the film in science, geography and citizenship classes. A Washington-state school board now requires that any teacher showing the film must ensure a "credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented" as well.

In B.C., a Surrey school trustee, Heather Stilwell, has been fighting for a policy to ensure teachers in the Vancouver suburb also present a balancing viewpoint. Meanwhile, Vancouver-based businessman Michael Chernoff, says his charitable foundation will provide to high schools DVD copies of the new British documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, featuring interviews with scientists who dissent from Mr. Gore's claims, as soon as the producer is ready to ship the discs. "And if they start sending [An Inconvenient Truth] to all Canadian schools, then I'll buy a copy of Swindle for all the schools, too," Mr. Chernoff says. "I think showing it is fine, but they should present the other side as well."

But even with Mr. Chernoff's gift, there's no requirement teachers to show both sides of the argument unless school boards demand it. "We've gone to school boards offering to provide them with materials that present the other side," says Mr. Jacobs. "You get the same answer, that the teacher has to teach a certain curriculum and how he does it is his business." Some teachers are open to alternative theories, he says.

But others, like Mr. Gore, have an agenda. On a discussion board on the CBC Web site last month, readers debated the Surrey controversy. One commentor, who identified himself as a teacher, wrote this: "Yes students should look at both sides on an issue and learn to judge for themselves. But there are times to do this and times to stop." He is certain Mr. Gore is right. Now, he wrote, "It is time for action." "

If you would like to email the author, here is the email address klibin@nationalpost.com

GORE'S GURU DISAGREES!

Lawrence Soloman reported that GORE'S GURU DISAGREES!

The Deniers, Part XX: Gore's guru disagreed by Lawrence Solomon

In the history of the global-warming movement, no scientist is more revered than Roger Revelle of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Harvard University and University of California San Diego. He was the co-author of the seminal 1957 paper that demonstrated that fossil fuels had increased carbon-dioxide levels in the air. Under his leadership, the President's Science Advisory Committee Panel on Environmental Pollution in 1965 published the first authoritative U.S. government report in which carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was officially recognized as a potential global problem. He was the author of the influential 1982 Scientific American article that elevated global warming on to the public agenda. For being "the grandfather of the greenhouse effect," as he put it, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by the first President Bush.

Roger Revelle's most consequential act, however, may have come in his role as a teacher, during the 1960s at Harvard. Dr. Revelle inspired a young student named Al Gore.

Dr. Revelle would change Gore's life, particularly since the climate-change field had become cutting edge, with Dr. Revelle adding to the excitement by giving his students advance notice of the fruits of his research.

"It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates," Gore later explained. "Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!"

Calling him "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," Gore thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. Gore's warmth for Dr. Revelle cooled, however, when it became clear that he had misunderstood his former professor: Although Dr. Revelle recognized potential harm from global warming, he also saw potential benefits and was by no means alarmed, as seen in this 1984 interview in Omni magazine:

Omni: A problem that has occupied your attention for many years is the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, which could cause the earth's climate to become warmer. Is this actually happening?

Revelle: I estimate that the total increase [in CO2] over the past hundred years has been about 21%. But whether the increase will lead to a significant rise in global temperature, we can't absolutely say.

Omni: What will the warming of the earth mean to us?

Revelle: There may be lots of effects. Increased CO2 in the air acts like a fertilizer for plants . . . you get more plant growth. Increasing CO2 levels also affect water transpiration, causing plants to close their pores and sweat less. That means plants will be able to grow in drier climates.

Omni: Does the increase in CO2 have anything to do with people saying the weather is getting worse?

Revelle: People are always saying the weather's getting worse. Actually, the CO2 increase is predicted to temper weather extremes . . . .

While Gore in the late 1980s was becoming a prominent politician, loudly warning of global warming dangers, Dr. Revelle was quietly warning against taking any drastic action.

In a July 14, 1988, in a letter to Congressman Jim Bates, he wrote that:

"Most scientists familiar with the subject are not yet willing to bet that the climate this year is the result of 'greenhouse warming.' As you very well know, climate is highly variable from year to year, and the causes of these variations are not at all well understood. My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." A few days later, he sent a similar letter to Senator Tim Wirth, cautioning ". . . we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."

Then in 1991, Dr. Revelle wrote an article for Cosmos, a scientific journal, with two illustrious colleagues, Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite. Entitled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," the article argued that decades of research could be required for the consequences of increased carbon dioxide to be understood, and laid out the harm that could come of acting recklessly:

"Drastic, precipitous and, especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent controls enacted now would be economically devastating, particularly for developing countries for whom reduced energy consumption would mean slower rates of economic growth without being able to delay greatly the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Yale economist William Nordhaus, one of the few who have been trying to deal quantitatively with the economics of the greenhouse effect, has pointed out that '... those who argue for strong measures to slow greenhouse warming have reached their conclusion without any discernible analysis of the costs and benefits . . . .' It would be prudent to complete the ongoing and recently expanded research so that we will know what we are doing before we act. 'Look before you leap' may still be good advice."

Three months after the Cosmos article appeared, Dr. Revelle died of a heart attack. One year later, with Al Gore running for vice-president in the 1992 presidential election, the inconsistency between Gore's pronouncements � he claimed that the "science was settled" then, too � and those of his mentor became national news. Gore responded with a withering attack, leading to claims that Dr. Revelle had become senile before his death, that Dr. Singer had duped Dr. Revelle into co-authoring the article, and that Dr. Singer had listed Dr. Revelle as a co-author over his objections. The sordid accusations ended in a defamation suit and an abject public apology in 1994 from Gore's academic hit man, a prominent Harvard scientist, who revealed his unsavory role and that of Gore in the fabrications against Dr. Singer and Dr. Revelle.

That was then. Would Dr. Revelle, if he were still alive, believe that global warming now demands urgent action? We can never know. We do know, however, that Dr. Revelle had no time for the alarmist views of Al Gore in the 1980s. We also know that those whose views Dr. Revelle respected continue to caution us against precipitous action: Dr. Revelle's colleague and friend, Fred Singer, is among the most prominent of Al Gore's critics, and economist William Nordhaus, generally considered the leading expert in the field, continue to warn of the economic danger of climate alarmism.

We also know that the science is still not settled, and that in the years since Dr. Revelle's death, new research from many of the world's most respected scientists bears out the cautions that Dr. Revelle bequeathed us.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Lawrence Solomon - Climate Change - Are You a Denier?

Any open-minded person should read Lawrence Soloman's articles on the climate change politico-scientific exaggeration! Global Warming!????

Articles by Lawrence Solomon

Lawrence Solomon, Urban Renaissance Institute's executive director, is a columnist for the National Post and past editor of The Next City magazine. Most of the pieces below were originally published in these two periodicals.

The Deniers, Part XX: Gore's guru disagreed by Lawrence Solomon
The famed scientist Dr. Roger Revelle changed Al Gore's life but Gore's warmth for Dr. Revelle cooled when it became clear he had misunderstood his former professor's position on global warming. National Post April 28/2007

The Deniers, Part XIX: Science, not politics by Lawrence Solomon
Dr. Friis-Christensen questions the very premise that human activity explains most of the global warming that we see, and through his work he has convinced much of an entire scientific discipline to explore his line of inquiry. National Post April 13/2007

The Deniers, Part XVIII: Fighting climate 'fluff' by Lawrence Solomon
Physicist Freeman Dyson knows from long experience that models containing numerous fudge factors are worthless. National Post April 5/2007

The Deniers, Part XVII: Little Ice Age is still with us by Lawrence Solomon
The Arctic offers evidence of global warming as a result of a natural process. National Post March 30/2007

The Deniers, Part XVI: Bitten by the IPCC by Lawrence Solomon
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is very particular about the scientists it selects to investigate the health consequences of global warming. National Post March 23/2007

The Deniers, Part XV: Unsettled science by Lawrence Solomon
A new no-holds-barred documentary on global warming is destined to raise a storm of controversy in the climate-change debate, with one particular scientist destined to be uncomfortably at its centre. National Post March 14/2007

The Deniers, Part XIV: The heat's in the sun by Lawrence Solomon
Earth hasn't been this hot in 8,000 years and, the hot spell is likely to carry on for a few more decades before the sun turns down the heat. National Post March 9/2007

The Deniers, Part XIII: Allegre's second thoughts by Lawrence Solomon
Leading French scientist Claude Allegre found, much to his surprise, that many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. National Post March 2/2007

The Deniers, Part XII: Clouded research by Lawrence Solomon
The world of climate science is all but ignoring the breakthroughs in climate knowledge a path-breaking new CERN experiment is about to reveal. National Post February 23/2007

The Deniers, Part XI: End the chill by Lawrence Solomon
Answers concerning climate change will come more quickly in a climate less chill to scientific investigation. National Post February 9/2007

The Deniers, Part X: Limited role for CO2 by Lawrence Solomon
CO2 does play a role in climate change, but a secondary role, one too small to preoccupy policymakers. Which isn't to say fossil fuels shouldn't be controlled � they should but not because of their adverse affects on climate. National Post February 2/2007

The Deniers, Part IX: Look to Mars for the truth on global warming by Lawrence Solomon
The real climate change news is solar irradiance: the Earth has hit its temperature ceiling and a protracted cooling period is predicted to take affect in 2012. The even bigger news: a deep freeze around 2055-60. National Post January 26/2007

The Deniers, Part VIII: The limits of predictability by Lawrence Solomon
Henk Tennekes is an object lesson in the limits of scientific inquiry. Lesser scientists, seeing that even a man of Tennekes's reputation was not free to voice dissent on climate change, learned their lesson: keep quiet. National Post January 19/2007

The Deniers, Part VII: Will the sun cool us? by Lawrence Solomon
The science is anything but settled, except for one virtual certainty: The world is about to enter a cooling period, says leading astronomer and mathematician, Nigel Weiss. National Post January 12/2007

The Deniers, Part VI: The sun moves climate change by Lawrence Solomon
A clear, verifiable mechanism showing how a greenhouse gas or other physical entity can drive climate change has eluded science. Until now. National Post January 5/2007

The Deniers, Part V: The original denier: into the cold by Lawrence Solomon
Dr. Lindzen is one of the original deniers � among the first to criticize the scientific bureaucracy, and scientists themselves, for claims about global warming that he views as unfounded and alarmist. National Post December 22/2006

The Deniers, Part IV: Polar scientists on thin ice by Lawrence Solomon
Antarctica's advance or retreat represents the greatest threat to the globe from global warming, bar none. National Post December 15/2006

The Deniers, Part III: The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science by Lawrence Solomon
How the International Panel on Climate Change in 2004 skipped the science in favour of capitalizing on the publicity opportunity the hurricane season presented to substantiate its claims about global warming. National Post December 8/2006

The Deniers, Part II: Warming is real � and has benefits by Lawrence Solomon
The science is not settled on global warming. National Post December 1/2006

The Deniers, Part I: Statistics needed by Lawrence Solomon
Prominent statistician Edward Wegman says climate scientists have done an inadequate job of incorporating statistical know-how. National Post November 28/2006

See Urban Renaisance Institute Here

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF [AGAIN] LINK!

This link is also very interesting. Many articles about climate change.

WOW! ALMOST 1/2 A DEGREE IN 107 YEARS!!!

"According to research cited by the IPCC in 2007, the Earth's average surface temperature has gone up about 0.6 C since the start of the 20th century. That may not sound like much, and many climatologists will agree that it isn't. But some say it's a sign of things to come." from CBC

This article is very interesting. Points on both sides but the above statement was very interesting to me.

You know how when they do polls, they say "accurate to within 3 - 4 points"? So how accurate is the 1/2 degree?

If you figure it out, that means that the earth's surface has been warming at the astounding rate of almost 0.0056074 degrees EVERY YEAR!! ARE YOU ALARMED NOW? WHAT KIND OF THERMOMETERS MEASURE WEATHER THAT ACCURATELY?

I THINK I WILL GO HOME AND HAVE A PANIC ATTACK!!!

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF PART 4

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF PART 3

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF PART 2

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF PART 1

DOOMSDAY CALLED OFF Part 5

Global Warming

Global Warming Swindle

New York Times accuses Gore of Inaccurate Facts

Scientist Loses Job for Correcting Inaccurate Facts about Global Warming

Candidate Number One: John Moore

Tuesday, April 24 - John Moore's "CounterPoint" in the National Post receives the Windbag Award #1!

1. Question: What qualifies John Moore to even make any comments on global warming? Surely he has not fallen victim to the Hollywood-syndrome that is evidenced by those celebrities who think because they ARE celebrities they know everything about everything? What research has he done? Surely he doesn't think that his verbal journalism achievements are scientific?
   
2. His whole article appears to be a frontman attempt to thrust himself in the limelight to become Canada's next Liberal leader after Dion.
3. He comments that "Doing nothing is always cheap" and I would agree and add that "Saying nothing is cheaper". No matter how many words you use to say it, if you have no qualifications on a topic, omit truth from one's rhetoric, and proceed to deny the attempts of the Conservative government to get a responsible energy bill passed, then you are a truth-denier! And saying nothing in many words can be a cause of global warming! All that hot air should be harnessed to run our "Windbag Generator" which would make a positive attempt to provide Canada with a clean NEW energy source!
4. It would be interesting to hear how John explains the highest temperature recorded in North America was in Death Valley, California in 1913. How many cars and factories contributed to the 134-degree temperature then John? [Reference:National Climatic Data Center: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalextremes.html#hightemp. Just curious!]
5. And of course, we must all realize that the boats trapped in ice of the coast of Newfoundland is a result of massive ice melting in the North Atlantic!
   
6. Added July 2007 - Just HAD TO add this comment that I heard during the last election from John on his CFRB show. Of course it is not a quote but the IDEA IS THE SAME. He asked the question of his radio audience, "Should the Pope be allowed to make comments on political topics?" [My response: HEY JOHN, DO YOU KNOW THE DEFINITION OF DEMOCRACY? I thought you believed in FREEDOMS? Why should the Pope SHUT UP, YOU DON'T! Perhaps the question should be re-phrased, "Should John Moore be allowed to make comments about religion when he is a self-declared atheist? Isn't part of being an atheist admitTing that you know nothing about a God?" If that is true, then should you be allowed to make comments on things you know nothing about? [Oh! Oh! Sorry Hollywood! You can say anything you want, especially if it is in your area of expertise, FANTASY!"]