Gore gored: Nine inconvenient rulings
Describing parts of Al Gore’s global brainwashing film, An Inconvenient Truth, as “alarmist”, a judge managed to find nine insupportable statements in the Oscar-winning jeremiad. He was ruling in a case brought to prevent its screening in British secondary schools. The case alleges the film is unfit for schools for being politically partisan, for containing serious scientific inaccuracies, and for being full of “sentimental mush”. Stewart Dimmock, the school governor who brought the case, said: “It’s a political shockumentary, it’s not a scientific documentary.”
According to the BBC, among the errors the defence could not explain were:
- Mr Gore’s assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said this was “distinctly alarmist” and it was common ground that if Greenland’s ice melted it would release this amount of water — “but only after, and over, millennia”.
- Mr Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming — the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.
- Mr Gore’s reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned “swimming long distances — up to 60 miles — to find the ice”. The judge said: “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.”
The judge did call the film “broadly accurate”, and ruled that subject to suitable warnings and guidance notes to provide balance it can be shown in schools. But then, that goes for a lot of fiction.
oh come now Ivo. Why is the judge in any better position to ‘rule’ on whether or not global warming is happening than Al? My sense is that people are scared that Gore is right and have turned to the law to make his statements untrue - but i don’t think that this really makes it any better. Polar bears are still dying, we are running out of fossil fuel and soon there won’t be any coral reefs to snorkel in - not matter what the cause its still something we should be addressing.
The judge is in a position to establish whether certain facts were misrepresented or indefensible. He said nothing (and couldn’t have said much) about the conclusions drawn from those facts.
You’re right that people are scared Gore is right. Fear is the entire point. That makes people turn to the law — not to make his statement untrue — but to force people to do something. There’s a great deal of vested interest in the fear-mongering business. Fear sells newspapers and movies. Fear drives subsidies for technologies that otherwise wouldn’t be profitable. Fear funds researchers with tax-dollar grants. Fear supports farmers who like laws that guarantee higher prices for their corn and cellulose waste. Fear is a useful tool for anti-capitalists desiring burdensome regulation on business.
We’re not running out of fossil fuel. Polar bears are not dying. They’re just the latest alarmist scare stories that invariably turn out not to be true.
Don’t get me wrong. I support nature conservation. I want to see a clean, healthy and productive environment, as does anyone who can afford it. But in order to afford it, we need to make investment decisions on facts, rather than fear. On reason, rather than emotion. You can’t make cost-benefit decisions if apocalyptic prophesies insist that the benefit of acting is infinite, because then any cost is justifiable. And while fairly simple problems with clear cost-benefit equations — like disease and sanitation — remain unresolved, I think it’s immoral to throw public money at speculative attempts to change the climate.
Inasmuch as Al Gore’s movie teaches kids to appeal to emotion in making decisions about what is good for the planet, and worse, prioritise what’s good for the planet over what’s good for humanity, it’s a misguided piece of indoctrination. It isn’t science, and shouldn’t be taught as such.
In fact, Ivo, the judge is only partly right. Just as you erred in saying Al Gore says he invented the Internet (you *do* know he never said it, but you perpetuate this bald-faced lie), so this judge is drawing incorrect conclusions, and you are taking them as gospel. Would you applied the same logic to Mr Bush.
Error 1: I’ll deal with this over time.
Error 2: It’s not *yet* the Pacific Ocean, but that’s coming. The Solomon Islands and Tuvalu Islands are on the very verge of being inundated.
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/02/16/braasch-tuvalu/
However, 10 000 people in India’s Sunderbans have not been so lucky. Around 100 000 more are threatened: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2006/12/22/2003341475
Error 3: In fact, predictions are that the Great Conveyer Belt could start shutting down from round about 2008.
Read here:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/05mar_arctic.htm
And it happened before, 770 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
Error 8: The judge is wrong:
Wikipedia notes:
Global warming has had an impact on polar bear population health and size. Recent declines in polar bear numbers can be linked to the retreat of sea ice and its formation later in the year. Ice is also breaking up earlier in the year, forcing bears ashore before they have time to build up sufficient fat stores, or forcing them to swim long distances, which may exhaust them, leading to drowning. The results of these effects of global warming have been thinner, stressed bears, decreased reproduction, and lower juvenile survival rates. [38]
AND
The most immediate and topically recognized threats to the polar bear are the drastic changes taking place in their natural habitat, which is literally melting away due to global warming.[64][65] The United States Geological Survey, for example, in November 2006, stated that the Arctic shrinkage in the Alaskan portion of the Beaufort Sea has led to a higher death rate for polar bear cubs.[66]
The others are all equally easily dissed, but let’s rather highlight Ivo’s typically selective quoting. He omits the central thrust of what the judge had to say:
“The judge did go on to say there was good support for the four main hypotheses of Gore’s film: that climate change is mainly caused by human-created emissions, that global temperatures are rising and are likely to continue to rise, that unchecked climate change will cause serious damage, and that governments and individuals could reduce its impact.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/14/climatechange.conservation
So: Gore gored?
No, Ivo spiked
I have re-read the judgement, and I don’t see my name referenced anywhere. Please tell me on which page it appears?
If you’d actually read the judgement, as I have, you’d note that it found Al Gore’s film to be political rather than scientific. It found the film was one-sided. It found that the film departed in several important respects from the “mainstream” as embodied in the IPCC reports. It warned teaching staff to take care not to themselves promote the views and policy recommendations in the film. It found several of the many errors and omissions noted by the claimant stood up to scrutiny and could not be explained by the defendant.
Still, I cannot discover in what way the judgement has anything to do with me. (That is what you’re inferring, right? You wouldn’t stoop to a puerile personal attack against me, on my own blog, when you’ve been asked to be polite, now would you?)
There was a handwritten note in the margin, however: “If the defence just had the nous to quote Wikipedia, we could have had this done and dusted by elevenses.”
Ivo, here’s a request: Apply the same ruthless vigour you do to Gore to your posterboy Bush, and let’s see what transpires. I’m prepared to bet the farm that you would never do it. Because, as Paul Krugman writes in today’s NYT, Gore drives neocons and cons totally crazy (that’s why you’re in lockstep with Rush/Ann/Townhall). Interestingly, Townhall and Ann have abandoned Bush. Rush and you can’t.
Watching Ivo embrace all that is Bush is like watching Mbeki defend Selebi: there’s a logic in there, but normal human beings simply cannot grasp it. And similarly, watching cons/neocons (Ivo a self-confessed dyed-in-the-wool neocon) all kneejerk to Gore is beyond the ken of normal, rational, thinking people.
That’s ideologues for you.
What’s Bush got to do with it? Kruggie’s column is a ripoff of a phrase Charles Krauthammer coined in 2003 to describe your sentiments about Bush.
But Frank, I’m not interested in your personal attacks, your unhinged rants and your stereotyping. This is my blog, and I don’t need you to hold forth on what my opinions are. If you want an attack blog, go start it yourself. I allowed your comments because I thought you might be civil and polite in a public forum. I was wrong. Bye now.